I am enjoying my time learning and setting up this server, but I have an issue where each time I reboot or shutdown the server the files and folders I created are just gone when I start the server back up again. Everything in terms of Docker/Apps are intact. How do I write files permanently to the system? Thanks

Writing files permanently is the way things work normally if you are using Unraid normally.

 

Where exactly are you writing? How exactly are you writing?

 

Are you writing to shares over the network or are you perhaps trying to work at the command line and testing things with paths that don't correspond to actual persistent storage?

 

Go to Tools - Diagnostics and attach the complete Diagnostics ZIP file to your NEXT post in this thread.

I guess this is a bit over my head, but I am just doing mkdir and testing text files and such. Nothing complicated. However none of it is recovered after a reboot. Oh I forgot to answer your question. Creating directories on root (~) and files within those directories. Doing it through the terminal provided

hydra-diagnostics-20201108-1051.zip

Edited November 8, 20205 yr by InMyGfazos

9 minutes ago, InMyGfazos said:

I guess this is a bit over my head, but I am just doing mkdir and testing text files and such. Nothing complicated. However none of it is recovered after a reboot. Oh I forgot to answer your question. Creating directories on root (~) and files within those directories. Doing it through the terminal provided

hydra-diagnostics-20201108-1051.zip 70.68 kB · 0 downloads

Unraid runs from RAM so anything that is not under persistent storage (typically mounted under /mnt) will not survive a reboot.

Ah that makes sense to me. When I perform an ls command nothing shows up. How would I access /mnt or whatever and start writing to the drives?

7 minutes ago, InMyGfazos said:

Ah that makes sense to me. When I perform an ls command nothing shows up. How would I access /mnt or whatever and start writing to the drives?

Not sure what you are asking - but ls / should show everything at the top level.  Most common Linux commands will work as normal.

 

If you are simply using ls with no parameters it will show what is in the current folder.   I think the default for the initial folder is /root which is located in RAM and is normally empty but you can always use the pwd command to find out what is the current directory.

 

5 minutes ago, itimpi said:

Not sure what you are asking - but ls / should show everything at the top level.  Most common Linux commands will work as normal.

 

If you are simply using ls with no parameters it will show what is in the current folder.   I think the default for the initial folder is /root which is located in RAM and is normally empty but you can always use the pwd command to find out what is the current directory.

 

Ok I'm just an idiot. Thanks it seems to work fine now. Appreciate your time helping such a basic question

Why are you trying to work with Unraid at the linux command line anyway?

 

You should be using the webUI to manage storage and access to that storage over the network, and to manage dockers and VMs. Accessing that storage (read/write) would normally be done over the network (Unraid IS a NAS, after all), or by dockers and VMs.

 

Don't expect it to act like a general purpose linux OS, it isn't. For example, root is the only user for the command line and webUI. The other "users" configured in the webUI are strictly for network access of storage.

 

Very occasionally it might be useful to work at the command line, but until you know how it is all supposed to work under the hood probably better to get familiar with the "normal" way of using Unraid, through its webUI and as NAS.

6 hours ago, InMyGfazos said:

How would I access /mnt or whatever and start writing to the drives?

/mnt/user is where the user shares are located, but to start writing to the drives, you create user shares in the webUI and write to them over the network.

 

It really seems like you don't have much of an idea of how Unraid is intended to be used. In the webUI, there is a link in lower right corner to the manual.

And if you do want a general purpose linux OS on Unraid, create a VM.