I understand that unraid has failsafe mechanisms to keep the data safe in the event of a HARDdive crash.  But, what if the motherboard on my computer fails?  I am using an old computer and I think the motherboard could be the first thing to go since all my harddrives are newer.  Anyway, if this were to happen how would I get the data off of the hard drives?  Because in the event of something like that happening I would probably just build a new computer and get new hard drives too (my current computer uses IDE drives and I would get SATA drives).

 

I know this is hypothetical at this point but it's something that I'm worried about happening.  Is my data really safe if my motherboard fails on the server?  What method would you use to get data off the hard drives in such an event?  Thanks!

A great question that is answered on the wiki and in fact one of the great selling points of the unraid setup..

 

This link - http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ#How_do_I_recover_data_from_an_unRAID_disk.3F outlines the recovery options for unraid data volumes. 

 

The simple answer is that unraid uses a standard linux file system format called ReiserFS that is VERY good at reliability and can be read by nearly any linux system and it appears that a driver is even available for window systems.  This means that should you decide to take your unraid system offline or it fails in some interesting and catastrophic way - as long as the drives are not physically/electrically harmed - you can get your data off the drives. 

 

 

Thank you so much!  I'm much more at ease now, and thanks for the link.

There are lots of possibilities and the new components would be able to read the old drives no problem. Heck, you could attach the drives to any old motherboard you have and boot a unlicensed version of unraid to create a 2-data drive server and copy the files from those drives to a new server. Then, just connect 2 more drives and do it again.

 

As another example given your case, you could build a new server and then install each old data drive into the new server, assign it as the cache and run the mover which would copy the data off that drive into the new array.

 

Lots of ways to get to the data.

 

Peter