I have an Unraid server, and have a friend with a second one. I want to give him a copy of a bunch of data and am trying to figure out the best approach.

 

I don't want to use an external drive as it takes quite a bit of time to copy across and then back, and since there is a distance involved I want to save him two trips (one to drop off, one to pick up).

 

I was thinking a better approach might be to buy a new drive, add it to my Unraid server, pre-clear and copy what I want to it and then hand him the drive to add to his array.

 

My question is whether I should be adding this disk to my standard array, and will Unraid complain when it's gone? Or should I add it as a cache drive, so that it is not calculated into parity (and presumably will have less impact on my server). If I use a cache drive, can I prevent Unraid from trying to move the data back to the array?

 

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I did this with SNAP plugin. Attach the new drive (out of the array) and copy the needed content to it.

Probably someone can have different approach and will share some experience to us.

Thanks for the suggstion Alexandro. I have never used SNAP, but will look into it.

 

Does anyone else have any other ideas?

I'd suggest NOT adding this new drive to your array, but rather simply mounting it from the terminal, and using rsync to copy files to it.

 

If you have the option of bringing your friend's machine onto your network, you can rsync directly to his machine, once you've mounted a read/write share.

 

If you use unmenu, it may be easier.  I'm pretty sure I remember seeing "mount" buttons available if you have a drive that is not inside your protected array already hooked up to your server.

 

You still need to rsync or otherwise copy the files over, but the mounting process can be simplified, as can the unmounting afterwards, using unmenu's Disk Management tools (if my memory serves me well.)

 

I am fond of

rsync -r -v --progress /mnt/user/television/[A-F]* /mnt/user/tempdrive

 

as a general form, and if I am moving rather than copying, I'll add "--remove-source-files" as an option as well.

 

(In case it looks odd to you, as it did to me just a couple months ago, the [A-F]* is what is known as a "regular expression" and it means "any file(s) that begin(s) with an uppercase A followed by whatever other characters may exist in the file name, and then any file(s) that begin(s) with an uppercase B..." et cetera.  [A-Z] is the whole shebang, but only if the file names begin with uppercase letters. 

 

You can use [0-9] for numbers, and [a-z] for lower case, of course.

 

And that's the extent of my regular expressions knowledge... others here will be more well-versed for pattern matching questions.)