USB Drive Died - Restoring from Diagnostics?

[aleaxander]

I've been running Unraid for a few months, with a single server running Plex, and with Mojave and Windows 10 VM's also installed. I've been very happy with it, but I made a big mistake about a week ago. My drives in the server would occasionally complain that they were running hot, so I pulled the box out to install a fan to cool them, but when I placed the server on my office chair, the arm of the chair caught and bent the USB drive sticking out of it  The drive was destroyed, and no amount of soldering could fix the broken connectors that had snapped off of the drive.

It took a few days to find a USB stick that would boot Unraid (I bought and tried two, until I finally ordered one someone on the forums said always worked for them, and yay, that one did work), I updated my Registration Key, and now I would like to recover as much of my original setup as possible.

I don't have a USB drive backup external from the Unraid server, a mistake I will never make again, but I may have run a back up at some point recently and just never copied it off the Unraid server. I'd like to look, but I wanted to check on one thing first:

I do have a very recent Diagnostics file that appears to have a "smart" folder that tells me what my three disks were setup as (cache, parity, and disk1 - this is great because my parity and disk1 drives are the same make and model), which means that now that I have the Unraid Server up and running again with a valid license, I should be able to select those drives and start the array right? I want to see if I have that USB backup, but I'm worried that starting the array may somehow make it impossible to restore my sever from the backup if it is indeed there. Is that the case?

If the backup is there, and restoring the array does not make it impossible to restore my older server, then I will do that, and based on my searches, it looks like there are plenty of instructions on how to do that kind of a restore.

But if there is no backup of the USB, would it be possible to use the files from the Diagnostics .zip I have to do the same? It is recent (no changes to drives since then) and appears to have a config folder, etc.

Thank you for any help you can give!

 

[trurl]

The diagnostics if they were taken with the current disk assignments should be sufficient to get your disk assignments back. The diagnostics themselves do contain some of your config, but a lot of things aren't there, such as docker templates. Why don't you post them and we will take a look and advise on how to proceed.

[aleaxander]

Thanks! So, if I remount the disks in the same array setup as before, and I find that I did make a USB backup recently, could I still use that backup to restore, or does mounting the array invalidate the backup?

I've attached the diagnostics files.

Again, thanks!

shire-diagnostics-20181126-1915.zip

[trurl]

Those diagnostics should be fine assuming you haven't changed disk assignments since they were taken. Just match the disk serial numbers when making the assignments.

 

In fact, you could probably just copy the config folder from the diagnostics to your new flash and it would boot up with the disks already assigned. You might edit config/disk.cfg and change autostart to no just in case.

 

That should get you going well enough to look for your flash backup. Obviously the array is not the ideal location for that, but we can discuss alternatives after you get going again.

 

If you don't find the backup, some of the files in diagnostics can serve as a guide to configuring some things. Most things in there are text files and you can examine them yourself. The files in the shares folder, for example, might be useful for configuring your shares as before, though the actual share names are anonymized.

 

If you take a look at some of the other files in there you might even be able to figure out how they correspond to settings from the webUI.

 

[aleaxander]

So it looks like I never did a backup of the USB drive. So dumb of me! That said, after assigning the array to the proper hard drives and mounting them, I was pleasantly surprised to find not only my Plex server docker was back up and running with no apparent issues, but also that the Mojave and Windows 10 VM's are also working just fine. The parity drive is doing a full sync, which I had hoped to avoid, but that's a small price to pay for the data still being there. I'm going through all the previous configurations that I had to make sure all is in order, reinstalling plugins and apps, and I suspect that something may ultimately be wrong with Plex given that binhex_crusador docker did not work correctly anymore (I fixed by doing an uninstall and reinstalling it), but I can cross that bridge when I come to it. Thanks for your help!

[trurl]

Do you mean you set plex up again and it worked as before? Or did it just start on its own? The templates that were on flash would be needed in order to create or edit it.

[aleaxander]

After creating a new USB Unraid device, I started the server, loaded the GUI, then I set the drives up in the GUI in the way they were (cache, drive 1 and the parity drive), and then mounted them. A parity check/rebuilding started and is going to be running for several more hours but all the data on my disk 1 seems to be fine. The original Plex Media docker that I had setup to auto start did so, and appears to be working properly, while the other docker I had installed, binhex_crusador (creates a GUI for the filesystem for copying, moving, etc) failed. I removed Crusador and reinstalled it, and now it is working. We'll see what happens when the next Plex update comes out... I'm not going to be shocked that it won't work. The Windows 10 and Mac Mojave VMS's seem to be working fine. I've had to reinstall my apps, but I don't use many (my Unraid sever setup is pretty basic). Also, I had an SMB share that I seem to need to setup again, but the other shared folders I had appear to still be setup and working. I am worried that there may be other issues that I'm not aware of, but so far the main things I wasn't really excited about having to re-setup, Plex, Win 10, and MAC OS (and of course trying to recover all the data on my non-parity drive) are working fine. 

[trurl]

You can always just download a zipped backup of flash at any time by going to Main - Boot Device - Flash - Flash Backup. Any changes you make in the webUI are saved on flash so making a backup any time you make a change is a good idea. It is especially important to have a backup with your current disk assignments so if you change those you should definitely get a backup.

 

If you want to backup automatically with CA Backup then it is best to have the flash backup go to something mounted with Unassigned Devices, either an external drive that you can read on another computer, or on a network share on another computer.