Overview

File Activity is a powerful Unraid plugin that helps you understand exactly what’s causing your disks to spin up by showing recent file write and modify activity across your array, pools, cache, and unassigned devices. With a brand new Go-based backend for improved performance and reliability, File Activity makes it easier than ever to track down unwanted disk activity and optimize your server.

Key Features

Go-Based Backend: The new watcher backend is written in Go for greater speed, efficiency, and stability.

Advanced Sorting & Filtering: Sort and filter activity by date, action, file path, or disk group to quickly find what you’re looking for.

Share Activity View: See activity grouped by share for a high-level overview.

Customizable Monitoring: Choose which disks, SSDs, cache, or unassigned devices to monitor.

Efficient Log Management: Automatic log rotation keeps performance high and storage usage low.

How File Activity Helps You

Troubleshooting Disk Spinups: Quickly identify which files or processes are causing disks to spin up unexpectedly.

Plugin & Docker Debugging: See if a plugin, Docker container, or VM is writing to disk when it shouldn’t.

Changelog

https://github.com/dkaser/unraid-fileactivity/releases

Feedback & Support

Questions, suggestions, or issues?

Reply to this thread or open an issue on GitHub: https://github.com/dkaser/unraid-fileactivity/issues.

Reserved.

dont display access to folders please. there are a million entries because of folder caching. previously, the plugin only displayed file access. displaying folder access makes the list unnecessarily long and it's not a "file activity" either.

Derp. Testing a fix now.

Edit: please enjoy 2025.06.14.

Edited June 14, 20251 yr by EDACerton

Can't confirm it's fixed :( There are still folder traversals

EDIT: I'm on 2025.06.15

Edited June 15, 20251 yr by meks

29 minutes ago, meks said:

Can't confirm it's fixed :( There are still folder traversals

EDIT: I'm on 2025.06.15

Try using the "Clear Data" button on the settings page and see if they come back.

Yeah you're right, false alarm. I misinterpreted the history from before the update. Folder access is indeed gone now, thank you!

Having an error flag up in the logs whenever I try to access the file list, it looks like /usr/local/emhttp/plugins/file.activity/locales/en_GB.json is missing - navigating it looks like there's no language file for those of us with our location set to UK.

26 minutes ago, AngelAbaddon said:

Having an error flag up in the logs whenever I try to access the file list, it looks like /usr/local/emhttp/plugins/file.activity/locales/en_GB.json is missing - navigating it looks like there's no language file for those of us with our location set to UK.

Can you explain “having an error”? Does it work/just seeing an error in logs, or does it not work, and what does the error look like? There’s a couple places that could produce a similar message.

Edit: I did a quick test on my computer, I see the same error in the Javascript console. This is harmless; it's checking to see if a UK-specific localization file exists (it doesn't, but it just falls back to en-US in that case). I'll look at suppressing that error in a future update, but for now you should be fine

Edited June 16, 20251 yr by EDACerton

Sorry about the lack of info, shouldn't try to diagnose stuff when I'm tired, but glad that's not an issue. I was thinking that was causing me problems as I couldn't get anything to show, but I've discovered it's actually an issue with the filters and the start date being set by default - no matter what I try, the date filter will not show any info. As soon as I clear it, my activity appears. I've attached screenshots showing what I'm seeing.

Hi,

Since this has been removed from CA, can someone tell me how to install it?

Thanks.

3 minutes ago, CaptainTivo said:

Hi,

Since this has been removed from CA, can someone tell me how to install it?

Thanks.

This is the updated version that is in CA.

Edited June 20, 20251 yr by EDACerton

The fileactivity-watcher.log file has filled up my log space

1 hour ago, Bili said:

The fileactivity-watcher.log file has filled up my log space

I’ll take a look at this in a bit, seems like you found a limit somewhere 😂

14 hours ago, Bili said:

The fileactivity-watcher.log file has filled up my log space

In essence, your system was creating activity faster than it could report it, which is why the "queue overflow" message occurred. With the previous backend, a similar fault would silently drop the activity; the new backend recognizes that as a problem, but logs it more than it should (obviously).

I've improved how this situation is handled in 2025.06.28:

• If a queue overflow occurs, file activity will make a few attempts at increasing the kernel limit to allow for more events to be retained

• After a certain point (right now, increasing that default from ~16K to around ~500K), it will log that it will not increase the limit any further; once this occurs, some activity messages may be lost (similar to the previous behavior), but no further messages will be logged about it.

Feel free to give it a try :)

Hey there,

thanks for the plugin.

Not sure if this is a bug or just misconfiguration / wrong usage. My array won't spin down and I can see frequent write accesses in the Main tab. But unfortunately my File Activity log will be empty.

Im using version 2025.06.28 with following settings.

I've not been using this plugin since about half a year ago and I changed some things on my hardware recently.

Thanks in advanced for your help.

Edited June 28, 20251 yr by alexalex89

1 hour ago, alexalex89 said:

array won't spin down

You probably have your system share on the array. These files are always open when Docker and/or VM Manager is enabled.

Attach Diagnostics ZIP to your NEXT post in this thread.

Thanks a lot for your help. I attached the diag files

unraid-diagnostics-20250628-1328.zip

//edit// seems like the last thing I did before posting this diagnosis might have helped. I deleted some empty dirs from appdata and docker directories on the array. the disks have been spun down since then.

Edited June 28, 20251 yr by alexalex89
different behaviour now

47 minutes ago, alexalex89 said:

deleted some empty dirs from appdata and docker directories on the array

Your appdata, domains, and system shares have files on the array (disk1). Ideally, these shares would have all files on cache or other pool with nothing on the array, so Docker/VM performance won't be impacted by slower array reads and especially writes, and so array disks can spin down since these files are always open.

Might as well take care of isos as well.

All of those mentioned Docker/VM related shares have files on disk1. They are set to only store files on cache, but are not configured to be moved, so any files already on the array will not be moved.

Nothing can move open files, so you have to go to Settings and disable both Docker and VM Manager before you can work with these shares.

Set each of these to Primary:cache; Secondary:array; Mover Action:array->cache. Then run mover, wait for it to complete, and post new diagnostics.

Also, you have a large number (53) of .cfg files for shares that no longer exist. Probably you accidentally created a lot of shares by specifying a path at the top level of array disk or pool or /mnt/user. Any folder at the top level is automatically a user share.

You can clean up all these useless .cfg files by clicking the CLEAN UP button on the User Shares page.

Today was the monthly mover day and I noticed 2 issues.

It seems like the filter has a problem with anything other than the american way of date/time usage.

Every entry is hidden by filters until I clear the date.

The update of the feed also seems somewhat broken. It displays items as a list up to a certain point and then stops until I clear the list, then it populates it again with entries up to a certain point and stops, rinse and repeat.

I'm having the same issue as others above. I'm not able to see any activity recorded by the plugin despite drives showing read/write activity.

Please install the "Plugin Diagnostics" app from CA, then generate and provide diagnostics for "File Activity".

16 minutes ago, Preston White said:

I'm having the same issue as others above. I'm not able to see any activity recorded by the plugin despite drives showing read/write activity.

21 hours ago, EDACerton said:

Please install the "Plugin Diagnostics" app from CA, then generate and provide diagnostics for "File Activity".

Diagnostics for File Activity from the Plugin Diagnostics app is attached.

Tower-file.activity-diag-20250709-173207.zip

2 hours ago, Preston White said:

Diagnostics for File Activity from the Plugin Diagnostics app is attached.

Tower-file.activity-diag-20250709-173207.zip

The immediate thing that jumps out to me is that you have files from /mnt/user/system on disk3:

system                            shareUseCache="prefer"  # Share exists on cache, disk3

This is likely either the docker or libvirt image, as both are located in /mnt/user/system -- and, by default, anything with "system" in the name is automatically filtered out of file activity. I can see that your install is using the default exclusions:

{"level":"info","filter":"(?i)appdata","time":1752107420,"message":"Adding exclusion filter"}
{"level":"info","filter":"(?i)docker","time":1752107420,"message":"Adding exclusion filter"}
{"level":"info","filter":"(?i)system","time":1752107420,"message":"Adding exclusion filter"}
{"level":"info","filter":"(?i)syslogs","time":1752107420,"message":"Adding exclusion filter"}

I would remove the exclusion for "system" (or even all of them), save settings, then check again after a bit.

12 hours ago, EDACerton said:

The immediate thing that jumps out to me is that you have files from /mnt/user/system on disk3:

system                            shareUseCache="prefer"  # Share exists on cache, disk3

This is likely either the docker or libvirt image, as both are located in /mnt/user/system -- and, by default, anything with "system" in the name is automatically filtered out of file activity. I can see that your install is using the default exclusions:

{"level":"info","filter":"(?i)appdata","time":1752107420,"message":"Adding exclusion filter"}
{"level":"info","filter":"(?i)docker","time":1752107420,"message":"Adding exclusion filter"}
{"level":"info","filter":"(?i)system","time":1752107420,"message":"Adding exclusion filter"}
{"level":"info","filter":"(?i)syslogs","time":1752107420,"message":"Adding exclusion filter"}

I would remove the exclusion for "system" (or even all of them), save settings, then check again after a bit.

EDIT: I used the unbalanced plugin to move the folder to the cache drive. Seemed to be an empty folder only using 1.00B of data.

The Unraid GUI confirms that all files in the /mnt/user/system share are on the cache drive and nothing is on disk3. Any suggestions on how to remedy what you are seeing in the diagnostics? Screenshots of the share attached.

Edited July 10, 20251 yr by Preston White