Hey everyone,

Happy Friday!

We just published the results of the 2026 Customer Survey, and we wanted to bring the conversation here where it belongs.

Nearly 3,000 of you responded — that's a big deal, and we don't take it lightly. The full breakdown is in the blog post, but the short version is: you told us what's working, what needs work, and where you want us to go next.

The four areas you flagged most clearly:

• UI/UX modernization — faster dashboard, better file browser, mobile-friendly

• Native Docker Compose support — first-class, not a workaround

• Docs and content — improved docs, more video guides, more beginner friendly Unraid University courses

• Pricing clarity and trial onboarding — clearer messaging, less friction getting started

All four are actively in motion.

But this thread is for you. Did the survey capture what's most important to you? Is there something you feel didn't get enough weight? We want to hear it.

Read the Survey Results here! 🔗

Also, if you took the survey and got some discounted Unraid merch, show it off here too!

The open-ended feedback really hit the nail on the head for me. The lack of docker-compose support, a sturdy built-in backup solution, and overall improvement to the UI & docs have been my biggest wants.

Excited to see what you all cook up for us this year! :)

Thank you for the survey. You can tell us the number of users in Belgium

Almost 3000 responders? Our sw. partner with 2M+ users couldn't achieve that. Not even speaking about to make the results public :-)

You have a future.

3 hours ago, Brian5542 said:

Thank you for the survey. You can tell us the number of users in Belgium

26 Belgian survey takers. Thousands more users 👍🙏

The 19% hardware guides figure caught my eye — and it connects directly to something worth flagging as internal boot rolls out.

The USB boot drive problems that drove the PSA on SanDisk thread and eventually the USB Flash section all came down to one thing — hardware selection.

Specifically NAND type and controller quality in always-on 24/7 duty.

Those exact same variables apply to whatever NVMe drive someone picks for internal boot.

A budget QLC NVMe pulling double duty as both boot device and cache pool is actually a worse failure scenario than a dead USB drive — you lose OS config and all cached data in a single event.

There's already a hardware guide in the USB Flash section that covers exactly this kind of thinking for USB drives.

As internal boot gets closer to release it seems like a natural opportunity to extend that guidance to NVMe selection — NAND type considerations, why QLC in a combined boot/cache role is risky, the Optane option for boot-only use.

The foundation is already there.

The 19% asking for hardware guides are going to need this whether they know it yet or not.

Getting it in place before the failures start is a lot easier than explaining it afterwards.

Edited March 14Mar 14 by Lolight

I wish there was a statement about a native backup solution.

Anyway great!

2 hours ago, enJOyIT said:

I wish there was a statement about a native backup solution.

This forum poll from July 2024 showed integrated backup as the top feature request at 36%

Genuinely curious how that maps to 13.9% in the current survey results

Edited March 14Mar 14 by Lolight

7 hours ago, SpencerJ said:

26 Belgian survey takers. Thousands more users 👍🙏

Nice, i am not alone. 😁

Thank you

I remember the days when Multiple Unraid Arrays and ZFS shared the top positions for some years.

Did Multiple Unraid Arrays fell off?

Edited March 14Mar 14 by hawihoney

It would be nice if the NAS product actually provided actual basic NAS features such as Multiple Arrays.

Hate to say it, but anyone wanting those 4 top features first are missing the forest from the trees.

1 hour ago, BRiT said:

Hate to say it, but anyone wanting those 4 top features first are missing the forest from the trees.

Agree with you here. It is not like Limetech has a campus full of developers cranking out and testing code. They punch pretty hard, given their size, but need focus on things which add value, not replicate solutions that already exist which can be used with Unraid.

A good example is "Integrated Backups". There are dozens of applications/methods for doing this. If Unraid were to include one, would people be happy? My guess is no, as there would be constant whining to add this feature or that feature. The bloat and support would be a drain of resources with no additional value gained.

3 hours ago, ConnerVT said:

It is not like Limetech has a campus full of developers cranking out and testing code. They punch pretty hard, given their size, but need focus on things which add value, not replicate solutions that already exist which can be used with Unraid.

The "solutions already exist" argument is reasonable on its face — but it assumes the guidance toward those solutions has been adequate, which the community's experience suggests it hasn't been.

The most prominently recommended backup solution for Unraid has documented restore reliability problems that were not disclosed to the tens of thousands of users directed toward it.

The ask for integrated backup isn't really about the absence of backup software — it's about the absence of a trusted, verified, supported path that matches the accessibility promise the platform makes everywhere else.

On resources — a team actively developing internal boot, UI modernisation, Docker Compose support, and Unraid University courses simultaneously is not a team too small to address its most requested feature. It's a team that has made a prioritisation choice.

That's entirely Limetech's prerogative — but framing it as a resource constraint rather than a priority decision understates the community's legitimate expectation.

One thing worth knowing — HexOS, built by former Limetech employees, has Buddy Backup — peer-to-peer Unraid-style server backup — shipping in version 1.1 immediately after their 1.0 release.

They're also sponsoring the ZFS AnyRaid project specifically to address mixed drive size support — a direct architectural move toward Unraid's core differentiator. They're a small team too. They found the resources.

The "people will just whine for more features" prediction may be correct.

It's also the argument that has been used to justify not building the most requested feature for at least three years running.

Edited March 15Mar 15 by Lolight

I'm curious where you'll draw the line for docker compose management : I used portainer, komodo and now dockhand to manage my stacks on my unraid server, the compose files are hosted on private github repos.

It is so easy to update my stacks on github (versioning, branching, ...) that I would never go back for less feature-wise.

On 3/13/2026 at 9:43 PM, SpencerJ said:

But this thread is for you. Did the survey capture what's most important to you? Is there something you feel didn't get enough weight? We want to hear it.

@SpencerJ

Taking that invitation at face value — two specific points worth raising directly.

On hardware guidance

Documentation & guides came in at 25.8% in the survey's feedback themes — essentially tied with UI/UX modernization as the top concern.

As internal boot gets closer to release this becomes pretty relevant — the same NAND type and controller quality variables that caused years of USB boot drive problems apply directly to NVMe selection too.

A budget QLC NVMe pulling double duty as both boot device and cache pool risks losing OS config and all cached data in a single failure — actually a worse scenario than a dead USB drive.

There's already a hardware guide in the USB Flash section covering this for USB drives.

Would extending that guidance to NVMe selection — specifically NAND type considerations and the risks of QLC in a combined boot/cache role — be part of the documentation commitment?

On backup reliability

The gap between backup coming in at 13.9% in the survey versus being the top feature request at 36% in a July 2024 forum poll is pretty striking.

That's a big difference for what's consistently been the community's most requested feature.

More immediately though — there's a specific concern about the Duplicati Complete Guide video published on the Uncast Show YouTube channel in June 2025.

Duplicati has well-documented restore reliability problems specifically in Linux Docker deployments — including a confirmed November 2025 bug where failed uploads produced backups that appeared to complete successfully but were actually unrestorable.

Users in the video's own comment section describe running into exactly this — corrupted database errors and missing files discovered only when they actually needed to restore, after months of thinking their backups were fine.

The video was produced by a Lime Technology employee without mentioning any of these known issues.

Would a pinned comment or description update be something the team would consider — just so viewers know to test their restores before depending on it for critical data?

Happy to discuss further if useful.

Will review the rest of your comment and get back to you.

5 hours ago, Lolight said:

The gap between backup coming in at 13.9% in the survey versus being the top feature request at 36% in a July 2024 forum poll is pretty striking.

That's a big difference for what's consistently been the community's most requested feature.

More immediately though — there's a specific concern about the Duplicati Complete Guide video published on the Uncast Show YouTube channel in June 2025.

Duplicati has well-documented restore reliability problems specifically in Linux Docker deployments — including a confirmed November 2025 bug where failed uploads produced backups that appeared to complete successfully but were actually unrestorable.

Do you have a link to this bug? We'd love to look into this and make changes if need be.

Backups are coming but from our internal data, it is not accurate to think that backups are the "top feature request" from users, fyi.

More to come, thanks!

3 hours ago, SpencerJ said:

Do you have a link to this bug? We'd love to look into this and make changes if need be.

Backups are coming but from our internal data, it is not accurate to think that backups are the "top feature request" from users, fyi.

Thanks for engaging with this — really appreciate it.

Here's the link to the November 2025 GitHub issue on the Duplicati repository:

https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati/issues/6626

It documents version 2.2.0.100 canary from November 5, 2025 — a failed dblock upload causing future backups to appear successful while actually being corrupted and unrestorable.

Worth noting this isn't an isolated bug — Duplicati's own forum has a thread from 2019 titled "Backup valid, but still unrestorable" documenting the same failure pattern updated through 2022, with a Duplicati developer acknowledging in 2021 that backup job interruptions causing this condition "does happen due to the current setup."

The architectural issue predates the November 2025 instance by years.

Users in the video's own comment section describe experiencing exactly this — corrupted database errors and missing files discovered only when they actually needed to restore, after months of thinking their backups were fine.

On the internal data point regarding backup priority — genuinely curious what that looks like compared to the July 2024 forum poll which had 651 participants and showed integrated backup at 36%.

If the internal data tells a different story it would be really useful to understand what it's measuring and how it differs from what the poll captured.

On hardware guidance — there are now three separate official Lime Technology documents that together reveal a specific gap worth addressing.

The 7.3 release notes state that "manufacturers have quietly shifted to cheaper NAND, endurance ratings have dropped, and flash failures have become more common" — the correct diagnosis of the USB failure cause.

The new TPM documentation states that "USB flash devices are becoming less reliable" and that "TPM-based licensing means your license remains valid even if you change boot devices" — correctly identifying the reliability decline and offering licence portability as the response.

Neither document addresses the fact that the same NAND quality decline affects the NVMe devices being recommended as replacements.

TPM licensing solves the licence management problem after a failure.

It doesn't address the hardware quality variable that determines whether that failure happens in the first place — or its consequences.

A budget QLC NVMe in always-on boot plus cache duty will fail for the same NAND quality reasons the release notes identify as causing USB failures, with the additional consequence of losing OS config and all cached data simultaneously.

The older motherboard guidance compounds this further.

Users directed to add an inexpensive TPM header module and switch to internal boot are making a hardware investment based on the reliability premise — without any indication that the NVMe device they select is the variable that actually determines whether that premise holds.

The TPM module purchase creates a specific confidence that the NAND quality guidance gap then undermines.

The place where this guidance matters most is before purchasing decisions are made — on the unraid.net product pages where people research Unraid, and in pinned community resources on the forum and Reddit.

By the time a user reaches the boot device selection screen the hardware is already installed and the choice is already made.

The 7.3 release notes already contain the right language.

There's already a hardware guide in the USB Flash section that could serve as the foundation. The work is largely done — it just needs official visibility at the right point in the user journey.

Looking forward to the follow-up. Thanks again for responding.

Edited March 19Mar 19 by Lolight

Updated kernel with AMD iGPU support would be nice!

18 hours ago, Lolight said:

Looking forward to the follow-up. Thanks again for responding.

Thanks for the detailed follow-up and the GitHub link. We looked into it.

On Duplicati: the November 2025 issue (#6626) is a real bug and worth knowing about, but we want to be precise about what it actually documents. The report was filed from a Windows machine running a canary build (2.2.0.100) backing up to Backblaze B2, not a Linux Docker deployment. The characterization of it as specifically affecting Linux Docker environments doesn't reflect what the bug report says. That distinction matters, since most Unraid users running Duplicati are doing so in Docker on Linux, and we don't want to misrepresent the scope of a known issue in either direction.

The video was also published in June 2025, several months before this bug was reported, so it couldn't have addressed it. That said, Duplicati has been actively updated since: a stable build (2.2.0.3) shipped in January 2026 with restore improvements, and a newer beta is out as of March. The software is being maintained.

On restore testing best practices, that's always worth surfacing. Whether a pinned comment makes sense is something we'll discuss with Ed, but the broader point about testing restores before depending on a backup for critical data is good advice regardless of software choice.

On the NVMe and hardware guidance question, the relationship between NAND quality and device reliability is real, and you're right that it's not unique to USB drives. Specific boot device guidance more broadly is something we're actively looking into as we continue to improve the new customer onboarding experience. You mentioned the existing hardware guide in the USB Flash section as a potential foundation. If you can drop a link I'd be happy to take a look.

On the survey vs. forum poll gap, the difference in those numbers comes down to who was sampled and how. The forum poll had 651 participants drawn from people actively browsing the forum at that moment. The 2026 Customer Survey had nearly 3,000 respondents across the broader Unraid user base, people who use Unraid daily but may never post on the forum. Those two populations typically have different priorities. The forum poll captures what the most vocal segment of the community wants most. The survey captures what a much wider cross-section of actual users ranked as a pain point, and in that group backup came in at 13.9%. Neither number is wrong. They're measuring different things. The forum is a real signal and backup is absolutely coming, but a self-selected forum poll and a 3,000-person customer survey are doing different jobs, and that's what the gap reflects.

5 hours ago, SpencerJ said:

Thanks for the detailed follow-up and the GitHub link. We looked into it.

Thanks for the thorough response — this is genuinely useful engagement and I appreciate it.

On Duplicati

The platform correction on bug #6626 is fair. The specific November 2025 instance was filed from Windows on a canary build — that's a valid distinction worth making.

The broader concern though isn't limited to that specific bug.

Duplicati's restore reliability problems on Linux Docker deployments are documented independently and significantly predate November 2025.

The Duplicati forum has a thread from 2019 titled "Backup valid, but still unrestorable" specifically about Linux deployments — updated through 2022 — with a Duplicati developer acknowledging in 2021 that backup job interruptions causing database desynchronisation "does happen due to the current setup."

The SQLite desynchronisation problem is specifically more severe on Linux due to Mono's resource consumption characteristics — which is Unraid's primary deployment environment.

The video's June 2025 publication date predating the November 2025 bug is accurate — but these architectural restore reliability problems were documented and available well before the video was produced.

On the January 2026 stable release — worth being precise about what it actually contains.

The primary change in version 2.2.0.3 is an update to the restore algorithm that limits cache size so restores can complete on systems with limited disk space.

That's a specific and useful fix for a specific scenario.

It doesn't address SQLite desynchronisation or the database corruption on interrupted backups that the community has documented since 2019.

The Mono runtime dependency on Linux that drives resource consumption issues is unchanged.

The stable designation is meaningful — but it reflects the developers' assessment that known critical bugs are resolved, not that the architectural characteristics that make restore testing essential have changed.

This actually strengthens rather than weakens the case for a pinned comment.

Users who configured Duplicati following the June 2025 video don't know about the January 2026 stable release, don't know whether their existing configuration is on the current version, and haven't been told to test their restores.

A pinned comment that says — verify you're running the current stable release, test your restores before depending on this for critical data, here's what to check — serves those users directly and costs nothing to add.

On hardware guidance

Really glad this is being looked into — the acknowledgement that NAND quality considerations aren't unique to USB drives is exactly the right framing.

Here's the USB Flash section guide: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/196967-unraid-boot-device-guide-usb-and-nvme-hardware-selection/

The NAND type hierarchy, always-on duty thermal characteristics, and the controller workload argument for MLC and 3D TLC over QLC are all there.

The NVMe extension is straightforward from that foundation — the same physics apply, the capacity thresholds where QLC becomes likely are different, and the combined boot plus cache failure consequence adds a specific dimension worth covering.

The 7.3 release notes' own language — "manufacturers have quietly shifted to cheaper NAND, endurance ratings have dropped" — is the right framing for why this guidance matters before purchasing decisions are made rather than during onboarding after hardware is already installed.

Happy to contribute to extending it if that's useful.

On the survey gap

The population sampling explanation is reasonable as far as it goes — the forum's self-selected technically vocal population does skew toward different priorities than the broader user base. That's a fair methodological point worth acknowledging.

The part the population explanation doesn't fully account for is the instrument design.

Open-ended feedback analysis compresses backup priority compared to forced-choice feature ranking — users writing freely about pain points tend to describe symptoms rather than features, and backup failures manifest as data loss experiences that don't always get categorized explicitly under "backup" in open-ended analysis.

A forced-choice ranking question administered to the same 3,000 respondents would likely produce a meaningfully different figure.

That's not a criticism of the survey's overall value — it's a methodological consideration worth factoring into how the 13.9% figure is weighted against other signals.

Genuinely looking forward to the boot device guidance development and the conversation with Ed on the pinned comment.

Edited March 21Mar 21 by Lolight

14 hours ago, Lolight said:

Thanks for the thorough response — this is genuinely useful engagement and I appreciate it.

On Duplicati

The platform correction on bug #6626 is fair. The specific November 2025 instance was filed from Windows on a canary build — that's a valid distinction worth making.

The broader concern though isn't limited to that specific bug.

Duplicati's restore reliability problems on Linux Docker deployments are documented independently and significantly predate November 2025.

The Duplicati forum has a thread from 2019 titled "Backup valid, but still unrestorable" specifically about Linux deployments — updated through 2022 — with a Duplicati developer acknowledging in 2021 that backup job interruptions causing database desynchronisation "does happen due to the current setup."

The SQLite desynchronisation problem is specifically more severe on Linux due to Mono's resource consumption characteristics — which is Unraid's primary deployment environment.

The video's June 2025 publication date predating the November 2025 bug is accurate — but these architectural restore reliability problems were documented and available well before the video was produced.

On the January 2026 stable release — worth being precise about what it actually contains.

The primary change in version 2.2.0.3 is an update to the restore algorithm that limits cache size so restores can complete on systems with limited disk space.

That's a specific and useful fix for a specific scenario.

It doesn't address SQLite desynchronisation or the database corruption on interrupted backups that the community has documented since 2019.

The Mono runtime dependency on Linux that drives resource consumption issues is unchanged.

The stable designation is meaningful — but it reflects the developers' assessment that known critical bugs are resolved, not that the architectural characteristics that make restore testing essential have changed.

This actually strengthens rather than weakens the case for a pinned comment.

Users who configured Duplicati following the June 2025 video don't know about the January 2026 stable release, don't know whether their existing configuration is on the current version, and haven't been told to test their restores.

A pinned comment that says — verify you're running the current stable release, test your restores before depending on this for critical data, here's what to check — serves those users directly and costs nothing to add.

On hardware guidance

Really glad this is being looked into — the acknowledgement that NAND quality considerations aren't unique to USB drives is exactly the right framing.

Here's the USB Flash section guide: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/196967-usb-flash-primer/#comment-1606140

The NAND type hierarchy, always-on duty thermal characteristics, and the controller workload argument for MLC and 3D TLC over QLC are all there.

The NVMe extension is straightforward from that foundation — the same physics apply, the capacity thresholds where QLC becomes likely are different, and the combined boot plus cache failure consequence adds a specific dimension worth covering.

The 7.3 release notes' own language — "manufacturers have quietly shifted to cheaper NAND, endurance ratings have dropped" — is the right framing for why this guidance matters before purchasing decisions are made rather than during onboarding after hardware is already installed.

Happy to contribute to extending it if that's useful.

On the survey gap

The population sampling explanation is reasonable as far as it goes — the forum's self-selected technically vocal population does skew toward different priorities than the broader user base. That's a fair methodological point worth acknowledging.

The part the population explanation doesn't fully account for is the instrument design.

Open-ended feedback analysis compresses backup priority compared to forced-choice feature ranking — users writing freely about pain points tend to describe symptoms rather than features, and backup failures manifest as data loss experiences that don't always get categorized explicitly under "backup" in open-ended analysis.

A forced-choice ranking question administered to the same 3,000 respondents would likely produce a meaningfully different figure.

That's not a criticism of the survey's overall value — it's a methodological consideration worth factoring into how the 13.9% figure is weighted against other signals.

Genuinely looking forward to the boot device guidance development and the conversation with Ed on the pinned comment.

Comment on video is pinned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihpbZFPwWXw

We have a ton of amazing stuff on deck for the rest of the year. I think you'll be happy!

9 hours ago, SpencerJ said:

We have a ton of amazing stuff on deck for the rest of the year. I think you'll be happy!

The pinned comment is genuinely appreciated — the restore testing recommendation and Docker permission warning are exactly what users depending on that setup need to know.

Thank you for following through!

On hardware guidance — the 7.3 release notes state that "manufacturers have quietly shifted to cheaper NAND, endurance ratings have dropped."

That's the correct USB failure diagnosis.

The same variable now applies to internal boot device selection — a budget QLC NVMe in always-on boot plus cache duty fails for the same reason, with the added consequence of losing OS config and cached data simultaneously.

The guidance needs to reach users before purchasing decisions are made — on product pages and in pinned community resources — not after hardware is already installed.

Is NVMe hardware selection guidance part of what's on deck, and is there any possibility of it landing before the stable release rather than after the main adoption wave builds?

Thanks for the kind words on the pinned comment @Lolight

On the NVMe guidance question: a few things worth clarifying. The combined failure scenario you’re describing, losing OS config and cached data simultaneously, assumes cache and boot are on the same device. That’s a user choice, not an Unraid default. Boot pools can also be mirrored across two devices, which provides straightforward protection against single-drive failure. These are mitigations that are already available to users today.

On the ask itself — we’re a small team and have to be careful and honest about what we can commit to publicly.However, we actively monitor support trends, escalations, and public bug reports, and will take appropriate action if needed.

For Docker Compose, the existing plugin is pretty good. It's definitely not perfect (for example, it doesn't support override files), but the integration into Unraid's Docker UI and the folder plugin is pretty good. I create one folder per compose stack to keep the containers organized. I'd love to see a native inplementetion that's very similar.

I'd also love to see LXC as a native feature, rather than having to use a plugin.

For backups, I'd love to see a leading backup solution (either Borgbackup or restic) implemented natively, with a web-based config UI. The Borgmatic Docker container is pretty good in the meantime though.

On 3/15/2026 at 12:39 AM, hawihoney said:

Did Multiple Unraid Arrays fell off?

Many of us don't even use arrays to begin with anymore. Just ZFS pools.

On 4/2/2026 at 9:36 AM, Daniel15 said:

For Docker Compose, the existing plugin is pretty good.

I had no issues with it. Though, these days I just make UnRaid a Docker Swarm worker and then deploy Swarm services to UnRaid from the manager VM. Works fine. But native compose integration makes sense.

Edited April 8Apr 8 by Lebowski89