I upgraded to 7.2.0 and got the notification that a few of my drives are XFS v4. I followed the migration guide to start the migration to v5 with the WebUI. I started mover manually and started seeing disk reads for the disk I chose to empty. So far so good.

However, then I starting browsing around my user share and noticed a bunch of files missing. Apparently all of the data from the disk I chose to empty was completely omitted form user shares. This just about gave me a heart attack because I thought data was being moved into the abyss.

Is this how its supposed to work or is this a bug?

If this is intentional the documentation and UI really needs to be updated to tell the user thats expected. If this is expected it really limits the utility of this feature... I don't understand why data for the entire disk is completely inaccessible by user shares during the entire move operation when this isn't the case for regular movements of data.

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/using-unraid-to/manage-storage/file-systems/#converting-to-a-new-file-system-type

Edited October 31, 2025Oct 31 by johnsanc

IIRC when you select a disk to be emptied, it's also excluded from user shares; this is to prevent new writes from going to that disk while it's being emptied.

Hi @johnsanc Thanks for the call out. We adjusted the behavior in 7.2.1-rc.1:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/194902-unraid-os-version-721-rc1-available/

and updated the docs:

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/using-unraid-to/manage-storage/file-systems/#converting-to-a-new-file-system-type

Now when a drive is marked to be emptied the data will remain visible in user shares, but no new files will be written to that drive. This is a better implementation of the "empty drive" feature that allows existing files to be used while still preventing new files from being added to the drive being emptied.

Ah excellent! That is a great solution. Thanks for the quick enhancement!