I am considering to use unraid.
One key question I have is how does unraid handle a catastrophic OS/USB stick or mainboard failure?

Is a fresh installation of unraid, on a new mainboard able to find and use an array of a previous installation on the harddrives of the old system?

You could place all your drives in a new machine with all data still available. You would need to know which was the parity drive. There are ways to determine this, but a simple text or spreadsheet document (located remotely) with drive sn’s and assignments makes this much simpler.

 

Using CA Backup to maintain a backup of the flash drive will also simplify your new setup since you won’t have to reinstall all your plugins and such.

 

Getting a new license for a replacement flash drive is also automated and very quick.

Thanks! I would ofc do a backup of the drive, but it's still good to know how a worst case is handled.

I had a flash drive fail once and did not have a recent backup.  Fortunately, I did not have to get another license since I use a Kingston USB flash card reader (the license is tied to the reader S/N). I just had to replace the flash card.  CA Previous Apps let me recover all of my docker configs and I manually reinstalled plugins. 

 

I have replaced motherboard, CPU, and RAM a couple of times in my servers.  This is even more changes than just replacing a failed motherboard.  Since the USB/license drive hold the information related to disk assignments and array configuration, replacing a failed motherboard or CPU is not a problem at all.  UnRAID is very hardware agnostic and runs on just about everything.

 

If both your mainboard and your USB flash drive fail at the same time (not likely, but possible) and you have no flash drive backup, the worst case scenario is that you prepare a new flash drive, do a new config and redefine your shares and other settings.  Your data remains intact. This is when it is critical that you know which drive is your parity drive.  I have labelled all of my drives, just to make it easier should this scenario occur.  Since my Parity drive is a different make and model than my data drives, it is really easy to keep it straight.

 

I once went through the process of a new flash drive and system setup just because I replaced the flash drive and wanted to clean up my config.  I restored what I wanted from CA Previous Apps and reconfigured the entire system in a couple of hours.  It really is very straightforward and easy to recover from flash or motherboard failures.

 

Your bigger concern should be data backups should something happen that causes you to lose a lot of drives/data. Like many, I maintain three backup copies (Cloud backup through CrashPlan Pro, a backup server on-site and external USB3 hard drives attached through the Unassigned Devices plugin which are stored in a safe place.

I had a catastrophic failure last night, which required me to re-flash the USB.

 

All you need to do in that case, if you still have access to the USB is keep a copy of the "Super.dat" file and your "Key" the rest can be wiped and replaced.

 

Keeping a backup would have helped me out but I was able to restore everything as it was with the way I did it.

 

The biggest pain was re-installing the plugins and having to setup the docker container templates again. The Dockers themselves were fine due to the appdata share being untouched.

Edited October 18, 20178 yr by MowMdown