Hi everyone,

 

I have been using Unraid for several years now - and I'm rebuilding my two systems.  I've found it's a lot of work to move things around because all my shares are spread across ten or more disks - I've been just using User Shares (http://lime-technology.com/setting-up-your-file-structure-and-user-shares-on-unraid/)

 

I'm wondering how others do this...  Do you keep all your photos on one or two drives, so that when you fire up your photo browsing software, only those disks spin up?  Same with movies, video games, etc?

 

Or do you spread all your collections over all your drives - so, in theory, if you had a couple drives fail, you would lose a smaller percentage of your collection?

 

Thanks,

 

Russell

Or do you spread all your collections over all your drives - so, in theory, if you had a couple drives fail, you would lose a smaller percentage of your collection?

That's my theory on how I store backups.

 

The only share I keep confined to one drive is my music.  So that when I'm bouncing from song to song I don't have to wait for another drive to spin up

Thanks Squid,

 

I probably should have indicated that I'm using CrashPlan for offsite backup - so this isn't my "backup strategy".

 

Curious to hear how others do it.

 

Thanks,

 

Russell

I'm wondering how others do this...  Do you keep all your photos on one or two drives, so that when you fire up your photo browsing software, only those disks spin up?  Same with movies, video games, etc?

 

Imagine Disk7 and Disk8 are aggregated into a user share call Pictures2015.  When I save images to Pictures2015, only these 2 disks are included in the share. 

 

Folder structure is as follows.

 

Pictures2015

  2015-01 Jan

      [2015-01-16] Black themed teen modeling sessions

      [2015-01-16] Smith, Betsy Retro shoot

     

  2015-02 Feb

      etc.....

 

Extreme discipline is important in the folder naming convention.  CAM2PC software is used to create the structure automatically during image card download.  Sadly this excellent piece of software isn't being updated, but continues to work.  I don't know what Mac users have found because this isn't possible as far as I could find for a Mac.    This kept us on PC's  Lightroom is incredible, and we use it exclusively but it is not flexible enough to create this structure.  So we use LR to process the images, but not download them.  On a busy day, we can pump 100gb worth of images onto the server.

 

We have the most recent few weeks images on workstations, automatically backed up to the unRaid server every 2 hours via cwRsync.  We can delete them off the workstations without worry as the unRaid server is backed up nightly.  Images typically are available in at least 2 places.

 

I like restricting the user shares, but the downside is that more management and planning is required.  I believe it is worth it.

 

Check out the blog post on photography on the site.

 

It sounds like I've been too lazy...

 

If I want my photo browser to be faster, I should consolidate photos onto as few drives as possible.  :-)

 

Thanks,

 

Russell

I keep anything that won't be enough data to require multiple drives to a single one. The way I look at it, spanning a share across multiple drives is only necessary if you've got enough data it requires multiple drives.

 

I also use a share for each type of media/file and setup the split level on the TV and movies so the contents of each season or movie are kept on a single drive.

 

I have run into a few cases where I have to move a few continuing TV series off an almost full drive but that doesn't happen too often.