This may be the wrong area - sorry if so.

 

I would like to keep a local limited cache of stuff that I access from unraid - does such a thing exist? My googling has not come up with anything, but finding the right keywords are difficult.

 

For example, pictures. I have pictures on an unraid share, I'd like to create a symlink to unraid from my pictures folder. However, I'd love it if there was also the possibility to have a local cache of 10GB or something.

 

Make sense?

I'm not aware of any utility that will do exactly what you've described;  but two things come to mind that may be useful:

 

(a)  Windows Offline files.    If you set the pictures folder for offline access, then Windows will maintain a copy of it locally; and will automatically sync it when connected to the network.  But there's no way that I'm aware of to make this work like a true "cache", where it only syncs recently used files.

 

(b)  You could use a synchronization utility like SyncToy or SyncBack to keep a local "cache folder" synchronized with the UnRAID store -- but you would have to manually put what you wanted in that local folder.    SyncBack allows very precise control of just how it treats the synchronization process ... so it's easy to set up to only sync TO the UnRAID server (which is what you want -- otherwise it would try to copy everything from UnRAID to the local folder).  So basically you could copy new pictures to the local folder -- they'd be automatically synced to UnRAID -- and as you needed more space locally you could delete some from the local folder.    In fact, you could somewhat automate this -- just set up a scheduled batch file to automatically delete files from the local folder that haven't been accessed in X days 

SyncBack sounds great - unfortunately I'm on OS X.

 

But thinks for pointing me in that direction. I'll look for some robust syncing tools for mac.

I'm not a "Mac guy", but I'm sure there are equivalent utilities for the Mac.

 

If you set up a local "staging" folder for your photos;  always copy new photos there;  set up an automated sync to the UnRAID "photos" share from that folder;  and also set up a scheduled task to automatically delete anything from the folder that's not been used in X days (you may need to play with "X" to decide what works best for you);  then that should operate almost like the cache you described.    The key differences are that (a) an older file that you retrieve from UnRAID won't be in it unless you copy it there;  and (b) the size of the folder won't be restricted -- it'll be up to you to manage that.

 

OS X includes rsync.

OS X includes rsync.

 

Sounds like that will do the trick.  Does it allow a "sync to" option, so it doesn't try to sync FROM the UnRAID server back to the local folder?    If so, that, coupled with a utility to automatically delete files not accessed in a specified number of days, would do the same as what I outlined for a Windows box.    If not, I'm sure there are Mac synchronization utilities that provide the necessary option(s)