I plan to purchase unRAID today/tomorrow (PRO) and was wondering a quick question. If my flash drive dies I assume I could get a new GUID generated for a new flash drive correct?

 

I am planning to use a 2 year old SanDisk 4GB one, hasn't been used much but would prefer to make sure it is safe to use if I can't get a new key made if the drive ever died on me.

My understanding is that Tom has been forgiving about keys that died in the past.  To be honest I'd be wanting a new drive, as a 4GB flash drive can be had for less than $10.

I ordered two originally so that I could have a backup in case my flash drive died.  I didn't want to wait for Tom to get back to me.  I wanted to be able to copy my daily backup of the flash drive to the backup flash drive.  Then copy the correct key for said flash drive and be up and running in minutes.  Then at my leisure I would get a replacement flash drive and get Tom to move the key from the bad one to the new one.  The reason I have 4 licenses now is that I wanted a USB SD reader as my boot device so that I could replace the SD card but keep the same GUID from the reader.  The model I got was a "Kingston MobileLite G2 USB reader" and I got two of them.  I would probably only have two licenses if I had started out with the reader.

Bob, I'd say (and this would only marginally extend the life) is to copy the daily backup to a different location, not write it to the backup. This way the drive is as fresh as possible when you need it, without the daily writes to it. Every little bit counts, right?

Bob, I'd say (and this would only marginally extend the life) is to copy the daily backup to a different location, not write it to the backup. This way the drive is as fresh as possible when you need it, without the daily writes to it. Every little bit counts, right?

I'm not copying it on a daily basis to a flash drive I just backup to a zip file on a daily basis on a separate NAS box.  The copying to a backup would only happen if the first flash drive died.  Then I stand a chance that the configuration files in the config directory will work on the backup flash drive.  Which reminds me I need to clean up the directory this is going to.  I might have several hundred zip files in it.

My mistake, misinterpreted what you said,

My mistake, misinterpreted what you said,

Though you might have.  Turns out my automated backup isn't working and hasn't been for months.  I think I re installed the OS on the VM that had it - silly me.  Now I have to recreate my batch file again.  On the plus side I can make it just do the config directory and save 120,000KB each file.  Since I use unRAID as more of an appliance I can re install the plugins.