I want to install a fresh server from scratch. How do I format all my drives and stop the parity build from data still on my disks

I want to install a fresh server from scratch. How do I format all my drives and stop the parity build from data still on my disks

Do you want to actually format all your data drives, so they no longer contain any files/folders?

 

I suspect you have some misunderstanding about formatting which is causing you to ask the part about building parity.

 

Format means "write an empty filesystem to this disk". That is what it has always meant in every operating system you have ever used. Since unRAID parity is real-time, unRAID treats this write of an empty filesystem just like it treats any other write. It updates parity. So if you format a drive while it is part of the parity array, parity will remain valid and there won't be any need to rebuild parity.

 

Also note that formatting doesn't actually do anything to most of the disk. Writing the empty filesystem just creates some metadata that represents an empty top level folder, ready to accept new files and folders. All the "bits" of any previous filesystem are still on the disk, but since they are no longer part of the new filesystem they don't matter.

 

So, since there isn't really much written, the write of the empty filesystem and updating of parity is really pretty quick.

 

To start completely over with unRAID, see Starting Over in the wiki. Then, if you want to format any particular drive, you can stop the array, click on the drive to get to its page, and change its filesystem to a different one. Then starting the array will format the drive and update parity.

 

Thanks for your reply, your right about my misunderstanding, I want to remove "appdata" from disks so that the only copy is on the cache. Seems I don't have a clue how to do this . tried search but still couldn't find an answer or solution I understand.

I want to remove "appdata" from disks so that the only copy is on the cache.

Set the appdata share to "Use cache disk" - "Prefer" and run the mover.