Plugin to sync 2 folders on an array?


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Let me just start off saying, I know all about how an were backups should be stored.  This is not an ideal situation for backups but it is far better than it was.

 

I am setting up an unRAID server for my father who is tech savvy enough to get around a computer and I would consider him a power user but just not to the extent of the people here on the forum.  That being said he knows absolutely nothing about linux and I need a simple solution that is a plug-in and not a docker I think a docker would be to complicated.

 

What I want to do is set up for each share a share that is hidden.  I will set up each share and hidden share to use different drives on the server.  What I need is a plug-in to sync everything on the main share to the hidden share.  This way if any drives fail that the parity can't correct for the data is still there.

 

The reason I need two copies of everything is that my father is cheap, he won't use a offsite backup service, and his current system is just placing drives in a desk drawer some of the drives are old, bad, or going bad.  I am currently weeding through the drives to find the ones that I think will work just fine but there are a couple so far that I do not trust so I am not going to use those.  The drives that I will be using in this server are going to be old and possible fail at any time.

 

Like I said before my father is cheap so if a drive fails he will be forced to replace it but for now this is what I have to work with.

 

Is there a plug-in that will do this? What I am finding in the community apps are dockers or for offsite syncing and I just need to sync one share with another (not in real time but one a day would be fine.)

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4 hours ago, sgibbers17 said:

The drives that I will be using in this server are going to be old and possible fail at any time.

Parity can't help if any of the remaining drives have errors. All drives in the parity array must be fully trustworthy.

 

I don't know of any plugins that do what your are asking, but a one line rsync command for each share in user scripts set to run periodically could do it.

 

Honestly it sounds like you are headed for major data loss, unless the strategy changes drastically.

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You really should just take some time to determine what is truly important enough that you can't afford to lose it. Most likely it won't require a lot of capacity. Then just back that up to disks outside the array (those disks in the drawer after you weed out the bad ones). That is probably going to be a better approach than what you are considering.

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15 hours ago, jonathanm said:

Parity can't help if any of the remaining drives have errors. All drives in the parity array must be fully trustworthy.

 

I don't know of any plugins that do what your are asking, but a one line rsync command for each share in user scripts set to run periodically could do it.

 

Honestly it sounds like you are headed for major data loss, unless the strategy changes drastically.

I am weeding through all the disks and so far I have found 2 drives that I would trust after 3 preclears and an extended smart test.

 

So far most of the drives just so smart data of UDMA CRC error count and Current pending sector.  So far the Current pending sectors have gone away without adding to the Reallocated sector count.  I have read that the UDMA CRC error count isn't indicative of drive failure but most likely a bad cable, I am also making sure this number doesn't increase.

 

What would the rsync command that I would use and how would I set it up to run on a schedule?  Is there an rsync plugin that would simplify this?

 

13 hours ago, trurl said:

You really should just take some time to determine what is truly important enough that you can't afford to lose it. Most likely it won't require a lot of capacity. Then just back that up to disks outside the array (those disks in the drawer after you weed out the bad ones). That is probably going to be a better approach than what you are considering.

He has a really bad backup system as of now.  Right now his backup system is when a drive starts to get full he buys a new drive then make a backup folder on the new drive that he copies all the old drive to then puts the old drive in to a drawer this has been going on since before SATA was a thing and he also has a drawer full of IDE drives but we wrote those off.  So he has backups of backups of backups some on drives that are going bad some that the data has corrupted he doesn't even know what is on what drive.  He wants to now go through all of his drives and consolidate his data.  We have consolidated enough of it for me to have 9 drives to go through and test.  Once I have his new server up and running I am going to either set up a off site backup solution with a third party or rsync the important stuff to my server.

Edited by sgibbers17
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