So I've been using this plugin recently to consolidate data spread across multiple drives and I noticed that whereas in the past notifications would send when an operation started and ended via discord, now it doesn't. I checked the logs and it mentions this:

message": "the request body contains invalid json.", "code": 50109}

Any ideas?

The log i checked is located in /var/log/notify_Discord

The log reads as follow:

attempt 1 of 4 failed

{"message": "The request body contains invalid JSON.", "code":>

{

"embeds": [

{

"title": "unbalanced operation update",

"description": "unbalanced - MOVE operation STARTED",

"timestamp": "2025-05-22T03:00:03.000Z",

"color": "39208",

"author": {

"icon_url": "https://craftassets.unraid.net/uploads/logos/un-m>

"name": "Yggdrasil"

},

"thumbnail": {

"url": "https://craftassets.unraid.net/uploads/discord/notify->

},

"fields": [

{

"name": "Description",

"value": "

The following commands will be executed:

(src: /mnt/disk1) rsync -avPR -X "Downloads/torrents_seedbox" >

(src: /mnt/disk1) rsync -avPR -X "Downloads/Youtube-DL" "/mnt/>

(src: /mnt/disk1) rsync -avPR -X "Downloads/Store" "/mnt/disk3>

(src: /mnt/disk1) rsync -avPR -X "Downloads/2_Output" "/mnt/di>

(src: /mnt/disk1) rsync -avPR -X "Downloads/1_Input" "/mnt/dis>

(src: /mnt/disk1) rsync -avPR -X "Downloads/Firefox" "/mnt/dis>

(src: /mnt/disk1) rsync -avPR -X "Downloads/.Recycle.Bin" "/mn>

(src: /mnt/disk2) rsync -avPR -X "Downloads/torrents_seedbox" >

(src: /mnt/disk2) rsync -avPR -X "Downloads/Store" "/mnt/disk3>

(src: /mnt/disk2) rsync -avPR -X "Downloads/Firefox" "/mnt/dis

Edited May 24, 20251 yr by Xerazal
Adding information

On 5/17/2025 at 7:11 PM, jbrodriguez said:

probably not a bad idea, would need some sort of depth setting too

Sorry for the delay. This would be amazing if possible. Perhaps a "set to 0 for unlimited" option. I know planning the scatter would take longer, but it would be worth it!

I am trying to move files from a failed/dead drive. The Plan screen doesn't seem to be doing anything; the top right has a wheel that is spinning, but I don't really see any progress. How long does this step usually take? The dead drive has about 17TBs of data on it. Do I just need to wait it out?

Edit: Yeah, it just took a while to complete, ~30 mins

Edited June 5, 20251 yr by ILoveBigServerICannotLie
Update

59 minutes ago, ILoveBigServerICannotLie said:

I am trying to move files from a failed/dead drive. The Plan screen doesn't seem to be doing anything; the top right has a wheel that is spinning, but I don't really see any progress. How long does this step usually take? The dead drive has about 17TBs of data on it. Do I just need to wait it out?

Edit: Yeah, it just took a while to complete, ~30 mins

No parity?!

38 minutes ago, _Shorty said:

No parity?!

I do; that's how I'm able to move stuff from the dead drive into a different drive. My Disk 1 is dead, yet I'm able to move contents from Disk 1 to another drive using Unbalanced. Pretty neat. Unless I'm doing something wrong?

11 minutes ago, ILoveBigServerICannotLie said:

I do; that's how I'm able to move stuff from the dead drive into a different drive. My Disk 1 is dead, yet I'm able to move contents from Disk 1 to another drive using Unbalanced. Pretty neat. Unless I'm doing something wrong?

Why not just take the dead one out and throw the replacement in? Then you just hit rebuild. Done. Not much point in the process you're undertaking, really.

7 minutes ago, _Shorty said:

Why not just take the dead one out and throw the replacement in? Then you just hit rebuild. Done. Not much point in the process you're undertaking, really.

Because I don't have a replacement drive... So what would you do then?

14 minutes ago, ILoveBigServerICannotLie said:

Because I don't have a replacement drive... So what would you do then?

Get one as soon as I could, and just let it be without one in the meantime. There's been at least one occasion over the years where I've had this happen to me, and I had to wait until payday to snag a replacement. Some may not be comfortable with that, but no harm, no foul, as far as I'm concerned. I've got two parity drives so I'm still safe unless two more die at the same time.

Has anyone ever run into problems getting Unbalanced to start? I've toggled it on and off a couple of times now, but when I open the Unbalanced dashboard all that shows in my browser are the words "server error".

I was wondering if there was a way to make this plugin use nice and ionice to run the rsync commands so that a disk being saturated doesn't cause lots of CPU wait time and IOWAIT?

Would love for this to be configurable, by either allowing a user editable prepend to the rsync scripts, or just a checkbox to "lower priority for better system stability".

As of now, when I need to unbalance something (which is rather rare but it does happen) I have to alias rsync with a wrapper so it behaves like I need it to.

This is not my first time to use this tool, but months ago I had a failing drive and I moved all my data off the drive which was mainly Plex data - movies, music, TV shows, etc. Getting the drive I wanted was a fiasco, but I just got a replacement which was larger than my parity, so the new drive became my parity and the old parity became my new Plex drive. I used unbalanced a few days ago to move all the Plex data from the other drives onto my old parity drive using Gather. The move is completed and all my movies, music and TV shows are on this drive. But now I cannot see any of the files or folders in the share, and neither can Plex. I can look at the drive and see all the files. Has anyone seen this before? What did I do wrong this time? unbalanced didn't give me any errors. All drives are xfs. I have run Docker Safe New Perms and rebooted after. Still not seeing these folders show up in the share in unRAID UI.

Figured it out. My Global Share Settings wasn't including all drives, and by adding the new drive to the array it was being omitted. I adjusted it to allow All by default and the data on the new drive showed up in the share.

I'm having an issue with Unbalanced not keeping track of the amount of free space on each drive. After I run some Unbalanced jobs to migrate data around, the free space listed in the main Unraid dashboard ends up being different from what Unbalanced is seeing. And it seems to get worse over time.

If I stop the array and start it again, the free space available syncs back up.

My unraid server is still running 6.12.15

Is there a way to select multiple folders at a time besides click each one individually?

I don't use this often, but when I do, it's a lifesaver!

Unusually, though, I've run into a bit of a snag this time around. I'm trying to consolidate data from a share that had been spread all around the array onto one drive.

It's been stuck showing this since last night:

I grabbed this screen shot of the current file it was working on at about 1000 this morning. It's now 1620, and it's showing it's still on the same file.

I tried clicking on the stop button around the time I took this screen shot, figuring that something had hung, yet it's still sitting here.

Clicking on the link in the UR dashboard to browse the share indicates that all files for this share are now on my destination drive (or cache), and that nothing is left on disk 10, which unbalanced is trying to copy files from.

Suggestions on where to go from here? Do I need to reboot the server to get the plugin to stop?

---

Additionally, though I don't think it's related, I got several of these NaN% indications. It appears as though there may have been one for an empty subdirectory from the main /immich share directory. I didn't get one for every disk, nor for every subdirectory. It seems to have processed past them all just fine, so it looks like maybe it's just a display bug. Not looking for a "solution" to this, just sharing as an observation and something to look at in the future.

Any thoughts? My unbalanced tab is still sitting & spinning on the same file. This is the 6th day...

I wanted to "move 1 array drive to a newly added array drive" (copying old XFS data to new ZFS drive).

So I fired up unbalance, selected the old drive and new drive and pushed "start"

it started around 200Mb/s, thats ok, but soon after it dropped down to 60Mb/s.

Some hours later it was down to <30Mb/s.

Unbalanced told me I should come back in 78hrs!!!

For a single disk!

After 33hrs I have canceled this joke :-(

Instead I fill the new disk over the LAN with robocopy.

Guess what? constant 250Mb/s the whole 16Tb were done within half a day!!!

So, why is this rsync so utterly slow that is makes such actions really really undesirable???

(and yeah, I know this plugin is just a frontend for rsync, it cannot do much against the slowness. But the question is: why is rsync that slow and isn't there a better alternative for linux out in the wild?)

Edited October 18, 2025Oct 18 by MAM59

Thanks for the app, it's a staple of getting stuff organised / changing discs etc.

I have a feature request, I do see it's been mentioned before. Could we have a PAUSE function please?

Thanks

Lee

Hi hello i have came unstuck a couple of times running unbalance where no matter what i can do i get something went wrong and cannot kill the error by going out and connecting back in to the plugin. The only way i can get it back working is to reboot the server how can i kill any services and start it again without rebooting the server tia

I am trying to move stuff around to upgrade XFS v4 to v5. I think there is a flaw in the formulas used for allocation since I sometimes get results like this, which will cause the move to fail and disk to fill up beyond its capacity. I have no idea what causes this, but the only way I've found to mitigate it is to select different destination disks or choose more granular selections (which is a ton of clicking)

On 11/10/2025 at 11:15 AM, Stratto said:

Hi hello i have came unstuck a couple of times running unbalance where no matter what i can do i get something went wrong and cannot kill the error by going out and connecting back in to the plugin. The only way i can get it back working is to reboot the server how can i kill any services and start it again without rebooting the server tia

could kill unbalance process on the command line, not ideal but should work

7 hours ago, johnsanc said:

I am trying to move stuff around to upgrade XFS v4 to v5. I think there is a flaw in the formulas used for allocation since I sometimes get results like this, which will cause the move to fail and disk to fill up beyond its capacity. I have no idea what causes this, but the only way I've found to mitigate it is to select different destination disks or choose more granular selections (which is a ton of clicking)

hmm crazy numbers, it would seem like an integer overflow, dont remember seeing something like this before tho ... i assume that's on a healthy drive right ?

can you check the logs (/var/logs/unbalance.log) when it happens, do they show anything meaningful ?

Hey. I have some issues with the tool as well. I just added a new drive to the array. Now I want to spread the exisiting data so that every drive is full as equally as possible. If I understood it right therefore I could use the gather tool. When I tried it, I was able to select one or multiple shares. One selected they were scanned. But There is no target showing up. So I can not proceed to move files etc. I already testet with docker and mover dis/and enabled.. Any idea how to solve this issue?

1 hour ago, pille said:

Hey. I have some issues with the tool as well. I just added a new drive to the array. Now I want to spread the exisiting data so that every drive is full as equally as possible. If I understood it right therefore I could use the gather tool. When I tried it, I was able to select one or multiple shares. One selected they were scanned. But There is no target showing up. So I can not proceed to move files etc. I already testet with docker and mover dis/and enabled.. Any idea how to solve this issue?

When you select a parent folder, it contains a group of files of a certain total size. If a target drive does not contain enough space for that total size then it is excluded from being selected. You must select from further down the tree, reducing the total filesize of what is selected, such that it is smaller than any target drives to which you wish to move things.

As for your goal of spreading things out as much as possible, I don't much see the point. It is arbitrary. And it is just going to cause you to need more drives spun up at the same time more often. You don't need to micromanage things to that degree. At most, you might want to group similar files onto the same drive, such as a particular parent folder. So when you watch certain TV shows only that one drive spins up. Or when you access all your pictures, that one drive is the only one that spins up. Things like that. Spreading out all your pictures over 10 drives so that whenever you browse them you have to wait until it spins up yet another drive doesn't make much sense.

When you throw a new drive in, just let the system do what it does. There's no need to move a whole bunch of stuff around. Just let it be empty space that gets filled naturally. The system will favour it until such time as its usage catches up with the other drives. Which is fine. It works well. And it means that all your recent additions to the file pool will mostly end up on that drive, and thus when you access any of it the system only needs to spin up that one drive. Just let the system do what it does.

8 hours ago, _Shorty said:

Is When you select a parent folder, it contains a group of files of a certain total size. If a target drive does not contain enough space for that total size then it is excluded from being selected. You must select from further down the tree, reducing the total filesize of what is selected, such that it is smaller than any target drives to which you wish to move things.

As for your goal of spreading things out as much as possible, I don't much see the point. It is arbitrary. And it is just going to cause you to need more drives spun up at the same time more often. You don't need to micromanage things to that degree. At most, you might want to group similar files onto the same drive, such as a particular parent folder. So when you watch certain TV shows only that one drive spins up. Or when you access all your pictures, that one drive is the only one that spins up. Things like that. Spreading out all your pictures over 10 drives so that whenever you browse them you have to wait until it spins up yet another drive doesn't make much sense.

When you throw a new drive in, just let the system do what it does. There's no need to move a whole bunch of stuff around. Just let it be empty space that gets filled naturally. The system will favour it until such time as its usage catches up with the other drives. Which is fine. It works well. And it means that all your recent additions to the file pool will mostly end up on that drive, and thus when you access any of it the system only needs to spin up that one drive. Just let the system do what it does.

Thanks for that very good and nice reply. I just thought that it might help with performance. But with your information I quess for me it is now a little bit better to dive into gatherings whole shows etc. instead of spreading them all around. Great info especially with the pictures. Do I have to do every season separately or is unbalanced smart enough to determine that E02 of S01 is on another disc and then just move this one when I select a whole show? Or will it then also put the whole show on a new drive where all fits? The only thing I might see with performance is, that all new stuff will be at the new drive, which is already a used one. And then there might be multiple streams to multiple clients, always from just this one drive. That does not really matter then? Do you also have a recommendation for the split level?

Edited December 15, 2025Dec 15 by pille