So, the USB drive that unRAID runs from just died. At this point, I am too tired to even think about what I will have to do to get it going.

 

Originally, I had bought two licenses, a USB drive died, and I switched it out for a new one that was already licensed. This time, I don't have a drive available and will have to get one in the morning, but I also don't have that second license either...I never got around to emailing the GUID to LT to get it set up for another drive, totally my fault.

 

The thought I had (as I pondered what tomorrow would entail) was - "what is it going to be like trying to set this all up again?" I had 10 or so dockers and (SIGH) a lot of plugins. How much work will it be to get it all back and configured?

I know I had recently seen talk of "how do you all back up unRAID?" and things like that. I wish I would have read more and maybe done something, but it seemed as though the general consensus was  "meh, no big deal, don't bother." (Which, seemed odd to me and I think I missed some useful details.)

 

I was wondering, and would love to hear back from people, if it would make sense to use rsync to copy unRAID to another USB drive that is always mounted. If you sync everything but the key information, you'd have an available USB in the instance something like this happens.

Is there already functionality to maintain a "ready-to-go" USB drive, or would that be useful as a feature? As an example: You have two USB drives plugged into the unRAID server, a plugin maintains the second as a copy of the bootable, one dies, but the other one would be quite easy to get going. You take out both, put the dead one in the trash, and put the new one in your desktop. You open it up, make it bootable, put it back in unRAID, boot up...and there it is. UnRAID says "hey, WTF? This license stuff isn't right." and then it updates it from whatever new functionality that was that I read about (and that I am probably going to get very excited about tomorrow.)

 

Anyone have any thoughts on feasibility, would it be a useful enhancement, or am I just overthinking it? 

Sigh...not looking forward to tomorrow.

CA's appdata backup module also has flash drive backup built into it (along with VM xml & nvram) with selectable destinations of any mounted file system on unRaid.  IE: the array, a UD mounted drive / UD mounted SMB destination, etc.

 

Additionally, when it makes a backup, it also saves a human readable list of your current drive assignments for ease in recreating.

 

Flash backup combined with the appdata backup and VM xml / nvram backup means that you can be back up and running with all of your plugins / docker apps / vms in a matter of minutes and not be able to tell that anything has changed.

CA's appdata backup module also has flash drive backup built into it (along with VM xml & nvram) with selectable destinations of any mounted file system on unRaid.  IE: the array, a UD mounted drive / UD mounted SMB destination, etc.

 

Additionally, when it makes a backup, it also saves a human readable list of your current drive assignments for ease in recreating.

 

Flash backup combined with the appdata backup and VM xml / nvram backup means that you can be back up and running with all of your plugins / docker apps / vms in a matter of minutes and not be able to tell that anything has changed.

 

Ah, that's awesome. I mean...kinda too late now, but I am going to keep it in mind when I get it going again. (Unless, I actually configured it and forgot, which is possible.)

Sidenote: I am hopeful that tomorrow is easy. I just happened to have taken a screenshot of my drives the other day to replace one. So, I can get those in the right place. I can figure the rest out, I am sure. It's possible that I even used the backup functionality in CA to do it. I remember configuring it, I just can't remember what I had configured now.

 

Thanks for the response. Already bought two SanDisk flash drives to pick up in the morning. Definitely going to use CA to keep everything backed up right this time. Hopefully, this doesn't have to be one of those extremely painful lessons.  :'(

Well, I am in a similar boat except not as bad off. I have two USB drives and each with its own license. I updated the primary to the latest OS version and it shows the correct configuration and everything is running correct.

 

The Backup USB drive and its license has an old configuration on it Parity plus 8 drives instead of Parity plus 12 drives. I tried to correct it from the GUI but because the new parity drive should be 4TB instead of the old 2TB. Trying to change the configuration from the Main tab of the Web GUI doesn't make sense since everything is correctly configured, just that the back up USB key has the wrong configuration. How do I correct this?

 

Ideally I want to have two separate USB drives with their own license so that if one dies I just power down switch the USB keys and restart the server. Any help would be much appreciated.

Just read the following:

The file unRAID stores the start/stop status in is config/super.dat, the same file that stores your disk assignments. Never restore a backup of config/super.dat that doesn't match your current disk assignments. If ever in doubt, delete this file and unRAID will make you reassign all your drives. There has been more than one user who used a backup that wasn't current and unRAID began writing parity to the wrong disk because config/super.dat showed their old parity - now reused as a data disk - was still the parity drive.

After copying the file config/super.dat from the working USB key to the backup USB key into the same location the backup USB key starts the server in the correct configuration. It has the correct Parity disc assigned as well as the proper order of data discs. It is running a parity-check at the moment and hopefully will be done in not too long of a time.