New Build and Drive Transfer

[kristisdad]

I'm toying with a complete new build, so I can find out all about this virtualization tech, dockers, drive formats and such without putting my current rig at risk.  When I build this new box, can I physically transfer drives from my old (current V 5.0.4) rig to the new V 6 rig without loss of data or do my old drives have to be copied to new drives on the V 6.  I just don't want to put my 10 drives of data at risk. Thanks.

 

If I took my current USB disk, backed it up, and put V6 on it and put it in my current rig, isn't it just a matter of using the drop down menus to match my drives in the logical positions to upgrade?  How to upgrade to 6 without losing the data on my drives?

 

I get sweaty palms just thinking about it!

[JonathanM]

I get sweaty palms just thinking about it!

Since you have already convinced yourself to build a new box, why not take the opportunity to alleviate some of the stress and get a pair of 4TB drives to put in the new tower, and start playing with those? That way you can leave the old tower alone as a backup, and start working on the new setup without the fear of messing up your data. You probably are growing your storage needs anyway at a fairly regular pace, so it's not like you wouldn't be buying new drives soon regardless of the upgrade.

[RobJ]

The data drives are safe, you can move them around almost anywhere, without danger to the data on the drives.  The parity protection associated with those drives is a different matter, somewhat problematic.  If you bring a subset of the drives to a new system, you will need to build a new parity drive.  If you bring ALL of the drives, including the parity drive, AND you copy over the disk.cfg file and super.dat file, then I believe you should have the same parity protection intact, with no parity checks necessary or special 'Trust My Array' procedure needed.  If you bring some of the drives over to test in a new system, and make no changes at all to them, then you could take them back to the old system, and parity protection would be almost intact on the old system, but not perfect, because just mounting the drives probably makes small housekeeping changes within the file system (things like timestamp when last accessed).  You would need to run a correcting parity check, which would find and fix a few bytes in the housekeeping part of the file system, essentially harmlessly.

[kristisdad]

Well, after two days of reading in the forum, I've decided to leave my server alone.  Basically it's a media server (about 13,000 tv episodes and 600 movies) that play well together in Version 5.0.4 using Plex outside and Kodi (xbmc) inside.  I would love to play with Ver6, but it looks like an inordinate amount of time is needed to tweak containers, plugins, and dockers to get them to play together.  I may play with Ver6 on a small test server as time allows, but I don't want to be patching an already working system.

 

To all who have put so much time and effort, I thank you, keep up the excellent work

[garycase]

Definitely agree that the best way to go is build an entirely new server to do your "playing" on.  While it's relatively simply to upgrade to v6, there are clearly still a few issues that need to be resolved ... and if you have a well-functioning system (as you do) it seems much safer to just leave well-enough alone and do any v6 experimentation outside of that.

 

None of my 3 operational servers are on v6 for exactly that reason  -- I do all my v6 experimentation on a separate dedicated box (and will simply build an entirely new server when I decide to move to v6 as my primary UnRAID).