Swapping in Larger Discs


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I need more server space, so I'm adding a 4Gb disc.  My server has 5 slots for discs, but there's 5 discs in there already, I want to copy content from one of the 500Gb discs to a local machine, swap the disc, then copy the data back.

 

All of my discs contain an app data folder, that relates to dockers - is this just being backed up across all the discs, or are the dockers tied to particular discs?  Is there anything stopping me from just moving the data off, swapping the discs and moving it back?  What else might I break?

 

Thanks!

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1 hour ago, Paul Rockliffe said:

I need more server space, so I'm adding a 4Gb disc.  My server has 5 slots for discs, but there's 5 discs in there already, I want to copy content from one of the 500Gb discs to a local machine, swap the disc, then copy the data back.

Let's just deal with this for now. You are thinking about this all wrong.

 

Just replace the 500GB disk with the 4GB disk and let it rebuild. No need to copy anything

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If you have a spare PCI slot you also have the option of adding an HBA card such as the LSI SAS 9201-8i which will have two SAS ports. Each of these can be connected to four SATA drives using a SAS to SATA cable giving a total of eight mroe SATA ports.

 

There are reputable resellers on eBay who will sell tested and flashed cards ready to plug in and go.

 

EDIT : This does assume you have spare slots in your unRAID license of course.

Edited by DanielCoffey
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7 hours ago, Paul Rockliffe said:

All of my discs contain an app data folder, that relates to dockers - is this just being backed up across all the discs, or are the dockers tied to particular discs?  Is there anything stopping me from just moving the data off, swapping the discs and moving it back?  What else might I break?

These are definitely not backups and dockers aren't tied to particular disks unless you specify specific disks in the volume mappings (not recommended). Normally you would configure dockers to only work with user shares, especially if you don't know why you would do it differently.

 

Since you don't have parity it's likely you also don't have cache, which is where appdata, system, and domains shares would ideally reside.

 

If you really want to go down this road instead of adding ports, it is going to be a little more complicated than just swapping disks. You should probably disable dockers (and VMs if you have any) until you get all the data moved. I think you would have to New Config to get it to accept the replacement disk, though I'm not entirely sure how it behaves when you don't have any parity to rebuild from or indeed any parity that needs to be resynced when you change disk assignments.

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Actually, I looked a bit further and it looks like all the files are on the drive I want to swap out!  Typical!  I don't really want to reset everything up if I can help it as I don't really know what I'm dong and it took me ages to get it all working! 

 

Can I back everything up so that I can restore it all once I've swapped the disc, or is there stuff that just won't work?

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If your dockers are setup to use User Shares, then it doesn't matter which disk anything is on.

 

User Shares are simply the aggregate of all top level folders on cache and array. User Shares are how Unraid allows folders to span disks. You can move appdata to any disk, assuming your dockers are set up to use the appdata user share instead of the corresponding folders on specific disks.

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You could use the 'Unassigned Devices' plugin and put the data drives in a USB housing.  Then you copy the files back from the USB drive which is directly connected to the server.  

 

Plus, I would question your decision to go with a 4TB drive.  Move up to an 8TB drive (minimum) to get yourself a bit of breathing room on storage capacity.  Get two or three of your drives out of the current setup to free up some drive slots and get a parity drive installed.  (Remember the question is, not if a hard drive will fail, but when...)  Either that or get a larger case that will support more drives.    

 

One more quick point.  Do you have at least one more backup of all irreplaceable data?  (There is another poster today who has probably lost some irreplaceable data because he did not have a backup.  And you should have a backup that is off site.  There is a greater possibility of losing data through the total destruction of your residence then from a drive failure in a properly monitored and maintained dual parity setup!)

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Thanks, that all makes sense and I think I understand what is going on.  All the Dockers are using UserShares.

 

I don't have any thing that's irreplaceable on there that isn't backed up.  It's just media, I keep photos and documents on Google Drive then back that up to the server, so it's just the backups I have 'at risk'.  I also backup to a local computer that is in a separate workshop building, so I'm not too worried about losing data. 

 

The server is quite old, so my plan is to keep it ticking over for a little bit longer then buy a new one next time I need more capacity.

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Thanks, I meant to ask if there was a way to get UnRaid to sort this for me!  Currently at 3m files and 25.8Gb!
Are you using plex and have a sizable library? How are you copying?

Doing it over the network is going to seriously balloon the size of the share. My suggestion is to use the appdata backup plugin to back it up and then restore. Should be miles faster and wont take up any extra space

Sent from my NSA monitored device

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  • 1 month later...

Just to follow up on this, I decided to to get another 4Tb drive and rebuild everything with one as a Parity drive and dropped in an SSD as a chance drive.  I've just got all the data back on and started to work through setting everything up again.

 

Woke up this morning, no WiFi, no heating, the breaker had tripped on my boiler cupboard where all the IT kit is.  Got everything back on but have just spotted that the 4TB drive that isn't the Parity drive is now claiming to have no file system.  I took the array offline, restarted in Maintenance Mode and am running the SMART Tests to see what's going on.  

 

The drive appears to be OK, it looks like I could format it and set it back up again, but given it was formatted and full of data, there must be a problem somewhere.

 

I've obviously not had anything  like this happen before, so want to make sure I don't do anything that stops the data being rebuilt.  So what should I do to get it all back running?

 

Thanks!

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8 hours ago, Paul Rockliffe said:

the breaker had tripped

Put your server on an UPS

 

8 hours ago, Paul Rockliffe said:

The drive appears to be OK, it looks like I could format it and set it back up again

If you format it you CANNOT rebuild it from parity. Just wanted to say that since it is a common mistake.

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I am not sure why you got this result but I want to point you to this WIKI:

 

      https://wiki.unraid.net/Check_Disk_Filesystems#Checking_and_fixing_drives_in_the_webGui

 

It is possible that you were using a    -n     option which means that the disk was only analyzed and not fixed. 

 

Another point.  Be sure to capture all of the output from any command (along with the actual command you ran to get those results) and post it with any queries that you have.  In doing file system repairs, it is always better to ask a question than to really screw something up because you are not sure of what to do next.

 

I am one who does not have much experience in file system repairs (Knock on Wood!!!)  but if you can't figure something out I will ping a gentlemen who has help many folks through this process.

 

EDIT: While posting up command lines and the result of command lines, please use the code format (the  </>   icon on the formatting bar of the reply box).  It is so much easier for us to recognize what-is-what if it is formatted.

Edited by Frank1940
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