unRAID newbie making the jump soon, question

[-Daedalus]

Hi all,

 

Have a home server at the moment, and planning on moving it to unRAID when some new hardware arrives. I've had a couple of general unRAID questions over the past while, most recently:

 

At present, my extra-important data is 1:1 backed up, and all my other media is on a RAID5. As far as I know, unRAID supports only one parity protected pool. While that's fine for media, I want to have a second copy of my important data somewhere. Can this be accomplished with unRAID? I don't really mind how, as long as it's on a separate drive somewhere.

 

Thanks!

[testdasi]

At present, my extra-important data is 1:1 backed up, and all my other media is on a RAID5. As far as I know, unRAID supports only one parity protected pool. While that's fine for media, I want to have a second copy of my important data somewhere. Can this be accomplished with unRAID? I don't really mind how, as long as it's on a separate drive somewhere.

You can mount the other drive outside of array using Unassigned Devices and set up Crashplan docker to automatically back up the extra-important data on array (perhaps by putting it in a separate folder / share) to this drive.

 

I think Unassigned Devices can even mount a network share (I never tested it!) so you can even back it up to a different PC. Crashplan subscription will allow you to back up to their storage for a 3rd layer of protection.

 

Your coming from RAID 5 though, I have to warn you: performance difference is day and night.

[tdallen]

Hi all,

 

Have a home server at the moment, and planning on moving it to unRAID when some new hardware arrives. I've had a couple of general unRAID questions over the past while, most recently:

 

At present, my extra-important data is 1:1 backed up, and all my other media is on a RAID5. As far as I know, unRAID supports only one parity protected pool. While that's fine for media, I want to have a second copy of my important data somewhere. Can this be accomplished with unRAID? I don't really mind how, as long as it's on a separate drive somewhere.

 

Thanks!

 

unRAID only supports on storage array on a server, so there will only be one copy of your data.  Strategies that people use to get maintain copies include:

- Data is on PCs and backed up to unRAID

- A second unRAID server with rsync script

- Crashplan for offsite backup to the Code42 cloud

- Many others...

 

How large is your collection of extra-important data?  If it can fit on a single disk you have a lot of options beyond the ones above.

[gundamguy]

Hi all,

 

Have a home server at the moment, and planning on moving it to unRAID when some new hardware arrives. I've had a couple of general unRAID questions over the past while, most recently:

 

At present, my extra-important data is 1:1 backed up, and all my other media is on a RAID5. As far as I know, unRAID supports only one parity protected pool. While that's fine for media, I want to have a second copy of my important data somewhere. Can this be accomplished with unRAID? I don't really mind how, as long as it's on a separate drive somewhere.

 

Thanks!

 

IMO it's a design failure to have your first and second copy co-located in the same machine. Ideally they won't even be at the same physical address to reduce the risk of fire / water / other natural or unnatural disasters.

 

It's hard to achieve this ideal I realize so I'm not suggesting you don't make a back up. In this case you can use plugins to mount disks outside of the array (not parity protected), back up to a another computer at the same physical address (could be parity protected depending on that computer). You can write a script to do the backups automatically and if your really clever you can even do incremental backups that work like Timemachine.

 

One of the best and worst things about having a Linux machine is the sky is basically the limit, the only question is if you will know how to accomplish what you set out to do.

[-Daedalus]

Thanks for the responses guys.

 

Lone drives outside the array at least give me an option. I know it's not ideal, but it's something I can use.

 

I'm aware the drives being in the same box isn't ideal - I might come up with something later on, but for the moment this is what I've got.

 

As for dockers and VMs: Is there something native in unRAID that allows backup of this data? I'm planning to keep all of that stuff in an SSD pool, so I'd like to schedule backups to the main array periodically. Is this possible? Obviously I could do it manually with rsync or similar, but ideally I'd like something unRAID can manage that mean minimal/no downtime of VMs or dockers.

[Squid]

Community Applications will now do docker appdata backups on a schedule or manually.

 

For VMs danioj has created a script to handle this

 

Sent from my LG-D852 using Tapatalk

 

[-Daedalus]

Your coming from RAID 5 though, I have to warn you: performance difference is day and night.

 

What was meant by this, might I ask?

[testdasi]

Your coming from RAID 5 though, I have to warn you: performance difference is day and night.

 

What was meant by this, might I ask?

RAID 5 is (a lot) faster than unRAID "same-same-but-different" design. So if you are expecting RAID 5 performance, you will be utterly catastrophically disappointed.

 

They have different pros and cons and to some (like me), the pros outweigh the speed con.

[-Daedalus]

Sorry, I should have mentioned I'm not actually coming from hardware RAID5. I'm running FlexRAID at the moment. Snapshot software RAID5 type thing. I get basically JBOD performance.

[bonienl]

Your coming from RAID 5 though, I have to warn you: performance difference is day and night.

 

What was meant by this, might I ask?

RAID 5 is (a lot) faster than unRAID "same-same-but-different" design. So if you are expecting RAID 5 performance, you will be utterly catastrophically disappointed.

 

They have different pros and cons and to some (like me), the pros outweigh the speed con.

 

I would say this is very relative to the hardware you are using. Most degradation is seen on systems with lower end CPUs, but modern (higher end) systems have little to none negative impact.

 

[-Daedalus]

Well the platform I'm running is off a C2750D4I, so there's pretty decent oomph there.

 

Next question! At this point I'll just lay out what I have.

 

FlexRAID 5+1 array

- Media. This should be pretty seamless, moving to unRAID

 

1TB drive, mirrored

- uTorrent buffer. uTorrent doesn't like directly writing to the array, for some reason, so stuff DLs here, and is moved over when done.

- Machine backups. Fairly self explanatory. These are done once a month, of the whole OS drive, on top of inc. doc. backups.

- Irreplaceable stuff. Documents, pictures, home video, etc.

- BTSync location. As it's always on, why not? Again, FlexRAID didn't like this being on the array.

 

 

Now, what I'm looking to move to:

512GB SSD cache pool

- Handling all duties of the 1TB mirror above.

- Storage for VM and container data

 

Array

- Same as above

 

Can any of the stuff listed be moved straight onto the array? Ideally, if I knew uTorrent (or similar) could write to the main array directly, that would ease my concerns a bit. (Mainly required SSD size).

 

 

Thanks all!

[Bjonness406]

FlexRAID 5+1 array

- Media. This should be pretty seamless, moving to unRAID

 

1TB drive, mirrored

- uTorrent buffer. uTorrent doesn't like directly writing to the array, for some reason, so stuff DLs here, and is moved over when done.

- Machine backups. Fairly self explanatory. These are done once a month, of the whole OS drive, on top of inc. doc. backups.

- Irreplaceable stuff. Documents, pictures, home video, etc.

- BTSync location. As it's always on, why not? Again, FlexRAID didn't like this being on the array.

I was using delugevpn from binhex without cache before, and I did not see any problems with it. Since I did not have any ssd for appdata, I got less read/write speed with normal transfers to the array. I think this was because of having appdata on array, and not having torrents on the array tho.

 

BTSync, I don't see why this would not work, but I have not tried it myself since I don't use BTSync.