Is it possible to add a drive into my unraid system and then copy that data onto a drive that is party of my unraid array?

 

Or is better to stop the array?

 

I have a couple of drives that i'm not exactly sure what is on them.  So via terminal, I was planning to temporarily mount a drive, then possible copy that data on one of the drives in unraid array.

 

Does anyone have any tips on that?

It depends what version you are running. If it below rc8 try searching for snap plugin or use unmenu to install it. It will let you moint drive outside of array. It does not work with the latest rc however , and it seams like dev on it is not active anymore.

 

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Why not just connect the drive to your Windows PC via a USB bridge and access it that way ... then just copy what you want to keep across the network?

 

You can read any of the Linux files on Windows using the free LinuxReader:

http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/

Why not just connect the drive to your Windows PC via a USB bridge and access it that way ... then just copy what you want to keep across the network?

 

You can read any of the Linux files on Windows using the free LinuxReader:

http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/

 

Thanks.  That may very well be the easiest approach to do it, although slightly slower in transferring data across the network vs all internally on the 1 machine.

 

I'll probably give this approach a shot first.

Yes.

 

The safest way would be to shutdown, connect the drive, power back up, verify that the drive is recognized by the system.  Note, via the syslog or unmenu, which device it is, e.g. /dev/sda or /dev/sdg.  Also using unmenu, trial and error, or a linux command I can't remember, identify which partition has your data, e.g. sda1

 

Then telnet into your box and:

 

cd /mnt
mkdir /mnt/imports
mount -t whateveryourfilesystemis /dev/sdX# /mnt/imports

 

This mounts the drive at the mountpoint imports

 

Then use midnight commander to copy your files over.

 

If you have hot-swap cages, you can just insert the drive without powering down or stopping the array, though YMMV on that one, and I wouldn't recommend it.  The system is designed also to accept new drives while the array is stopped, which has worked fine for me.

 

When you're done, remember to unmount the drive and delete the mountpoint:

 

cd /mnt
umount /mnt/imports

 

And I type all this in from memory and only THEN do I remember the Configuration Tutorial!  http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Configuration_Tutorial#Copying_Files_From_an_Internal_or_External_Hard_Drive

Used the tutorial linked above in the wiki with no problems with a combination of ext3 and NTFS drives. I used midnight commander to copy the files over to the array. Did one drive at a time, then added it to the array. Worked perfectly.

although slightly slower in transferring data across the network vs all internally on the 1 machine.

 

Assuming your array is parity protected, and that you have a Gb network, it's not any slower to do it this way than internally.    Your network can transfer data FAR faster than the speed at which UnRAID can write to the protected array ... so it doesn't matter whether you're writing the data across the network or internally on the UnRAID box.