I just lost a big bunch of data, because something about the cache system changed?

I miss now a setting in each share. If it should use the cache or not. Lots of my shares were set to NOT use the cache at all. These folder all of a sudden popped up on the cache drive.
Now there is only a setting what is prefered. Array or Cache.

That lead to unraid copying all the content it could to the cache drive. For example my backup folder which is 6 times the size of the cache drive, mounted what was left. No realizing this because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ you rarely check for such things, borg was sending backups and now all my borg archives are broken beyond repair.

I need to be super super sure that stuff in /mnt/user is not in /mnt/cache, gets not moved and so on. I will manage that myself.
The upper was true for me, until a short time ago. no clue when it changed.

How can I do that?

Edited August 2, 2025Aug 2 by Lindworm

The share behaviour has NOT changed although some of the terminology did change a few releases ago.

Perhaps you need to carefully read the online documentation about User Shares That might help you understand how to set up any caching and whether files should be moved between cache and array.

Regarding the shares ending up on the cache rather than the pool then make sure the Caution (which is not new) does not apply to your case.

If you are still getting unexpected behaviour then post your diagnostics zip file giving the name of a share you think is misbehaving so we can look to see why.

I am using unraid now since version 4 and this is an ever growing setup. The mover was never on. And yes something changed. The tick box "use cache" is gone on the share config page, for example, instead I can only tell if I prefer Array or Cache. Totaly different behavior. (Might be changed a couple of versions ago, i do usualy not babysit unraid)

Now the mover is set to hourly and directories gets moved to /mnt/cache that in the last 6 years never popped up on it and were only visible and accessible in /mnt/cache. I have never ever experienced a back copy from HDD to NVME cache before. Now when I drop a test folder in /mnt/user, wait an houre, unmount everything and only mount the cache drive, I see all the data which should be in /mnt/user and not on the cache.

Edited August 2, 2025Aug 2 by Lindworm

But thanks for the link, while checking and reading, I realized that a bunch of settings are wrong now and differ from my last personal documentation. I think I can fix that now on my own.

Here is the way I fixed my problem. The broken backups are just backups. No worries there, can be restarted after fix. Deleted those folders.

Some stuff was misconfigured. For whatever reason all Array only folders had Cache as main storage configured and the mover action to move from Array to Cache. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I turned that around, hit the mover, to start moving. Now everything is slowly moving to the array. When done, I disable the mover behavior in the share. Then new files only drop in the array.

I tested the behavior with some test data, and all looks well as it should.

This must got broken with the last update. I don't know how, buut the tools you get to fix that are decent. Thanks.

Edited August 2, 2025Aug 2 by Lindworm