Cheers, 

I've been running on Unraid 6.9.2 on my main Unraid server for several years and skimped on upgrading. 
I had a corruption happen in one of my docker instances which I tracked to something happen on one of 

my pool devices. I decided to replace the cache drives (there are 2 nvme drives in that pool) and I now 
have everything up again and parity-check will finish in about 12 hours from now. 

 

Note. I saw various things that spooked me during the upgrade since I had to move a lot of data around. 
I have like most people the shares for isos, domains, appdata and system on the cache pool (prefer in 6.9.2 

speak). I use CA Backup Appdata v2.5 for docker backup (the latest version on Unraid 6.9.2) and VM Backup 

(which is still a beta) for domains (virtual machines). 

During restoring from these backups I noticed some backups were corrupt and gave CRC errors, but there 

no errors in the CA-Backups logs. The VM backups were fine. 

I also noted that one of the containers had millions of small healthcheck files and during recovery I had 
to script the removal of these files since find, mv, rm, ls would give an error since they couldn't generate 
the list of the files. It seemed that CA-Backup didn't catch these errors, and not Mover either (Mover actually 
removed files after thinking it had copied the files). Good to have more than one backup...

I have reviewed Update Assistant which warns me about Community Applications, Tips and Tweaks, 

Unassigned Devices, Unassigned Devices Plus and Unassigned Devices PreClear not being up2date. 
I am running the latest versions of these plugins available for version 6.9.2. 

I have downloaded a flash backup (using Unraid), diagnostics and most screenshots from Main and 
Shares that might come in handy in case of something breaking. 

I have one 2 TB pool from 2 new nvme devices for cache using btrfs. 
This is mainly for appdata, domains, isos and system. 

I have one 4 TB pool from 2 SSD disks, this is mostly for scratch data and processing. 

 

The array has 11 devices including 2 for parity. I have had to replace 2 drives but otherwise stable. 

 

The computer is my own build, Gigabyte C246-WU4-CF, Intel i9-9900, 128 GB DDR4 (four DIMMs), 
2 ethernet 1 Gbit bonded interface and an old NVidia GPU. 

At the moment I am waiting for the Parity check to finish, I have manual backups of everything 

important and will perform upgrade when the check finished. 

 

Questions: 
- Is it better to upgrade from 6.9.2 to the current release 6.12.13 or perform the upgrade in steps. 
i.e. from 6.9.2 to 6.10.3, to 6.11.5, to 6.12.13? 

- should I remove Community Applications, Tips and Tweaks, Unassigned Devices, Unassigned Devices

Plus and Unassigned Devices PreClear plugins before upgrading since they are not up2date or leave 

them as is?

 

- Are there any better backup tools out there that better gracefully handle errors like above? 

Thanks!
 

You can upgrade directly to 6.12.13, but recommend reading the release notes for 6.12.13 and all major releases in between, 6.10.0, 6.11.0 and 6.12.0

 

You can remove, but I think they will be removed automatically, you can then re-install the current versions.

Thanks, will read the release notes.