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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

Hi All,

I’ve been learning on an unraid server for a little less than a year. I have an array of 4 HDs mounted via USB externally. I know it’s not ideal, but I kind of started learning and now… well here we are.

I’m getting ready for a move, and before I pack it up, do I need to make sure I keep track of whats plugged in where? I’m not clear if the array will go by the HD device ID or not.

There are four drives in 2x USB connected drive duplicators, if that makes a difference (I know I know). I have not touched anything and can spin it back up to check on any specifics, plenty of other things to pack for a few days.

Thank you for any help!

  • So I had questions on practicing restore! I wanted to start by just making sure I had something, but how does one validate, short of having a duplicate hardware setup to restore to?

    Some of this is a bit extreme but a lot of it is capabilities I’ll be slowly building up. Read only backups is a fantastic point. I am indeed working at offsite backups. I have a separate drive for all the “untimely exit” stuff, and, most importantly, a physical printed folder in a fireproof safe. I have had/have some health issues that make it relevant. I strongly encourage practicality of air-tight security there. A plain text with accounts and passwords is a bad idea, but plain text naming where accounts are is reasonable. Yes, there’s always social engineering, but the people at those firms should be looking for proper legal documentation from the executor of the estate, and 98% of people are more likely to have a loved one who is cleaning things up than have someone stealing their identity. There is so much to handle when someone passes, any impediment makes it more likely someone just brute forces things.

    Re: Scrubbing “impolite” data. I lost someone last fall who was a data nut (tons of personal and professional videos and photos). We joked about finding their porn stash, but mostly we got drunk clicked around, and laughed at them flubbing a take at a work video, I cried a bit at a motorcycle maintenance list they never got to, that kind of thing. End of life is messy and gross. If it doesn’t carry jail time I can promise you no one will care whats on the computer after cleaning the endless bodily fluids out of the bed and carpet.

    I may pattern the backups of some drives, but there’s no way I’m going to have enough space to do that for 20+ TB of media. I like my media archive, I’ve spent a long time building it, but having the main drive, the local backup in a RAID, and an offsite is probably where that will end. The offsite will probably be a monthly one so that should help.

    On the other hand, I am working on cool genealogy project through gramps, which is intended to be a “forever archive” kind of thing. That I may pattern as the data would be incredibly difficult to replace and there’s an increased chance of non-malicious issues given I’ll be opening it up to extended family of varying technical expertise. THAT I may pattern more extensively the way you suggest.

  • This is really helpful thank you! I think it’s samba share? Whatever Unraid has just baked in and calls “shares”.

    Googling rsync that looks like it’ll work, and faster is better!

    While I do want true backups of a few drives (as in: if a drive fails, restore the backup to a new drive, physically swap it out, and you’re good to go), the majority of the data I’m just looking to have it “backed up” (as in: all of the files are present in more than one location). The majority of the data is ~18TB of media for my plex server. My unraid is: 1x 2TB, 1x 10TB, 1x20TB and 1x20TB(parity). It sounds like Rsync-ing the 20TB drive with my plex media and the 20TB unraid disk would get me what I need?

    Thanks for the pointers, getting a few things to google is incredibly helpful.

Stumbling through getting a proper backup regime in place. I have an unraid system running a proper array, and am trying to setup backups for two separate machines (one windows one debian). I’ve successfully setup a file share, and have duplicati running. Are there disadvantages to just setting the network folder as the destination for the backup? It seems a little hamfisted (and the data rates are terrible).

It seems like there’s probably a better way to do this…

  • For anyone in that spot of being savvy-ish but having fellow users that finally got used to plex:

    A work around is Xteve and owncast. I was successfully able to make an owncast broadcast into a “DVR channel”.

    Its cluegy but it does work. My tech level in this stuff is spotty. I’m used to stacks of tech but more for physical control systems (NOT consumer facing). But I was able to get that to work.

    Edit: little bit of clarification: Xteve will let you add DVR to your plex server. It’s possible to tie owncast into Xteve. That allows users to cue into a “DVR” channel which is kind of “simulcasting” whatever you’re pointing owncast to. In my case it was a screen share of sportsball, but it could be whatever.

  • I love this. I have a box I’ve been wanting to move to a family members place because they have fiber and I don’t. They’re heavy users of the plex server I have on there, so they’re happy to host it, but if I ever had issues around anything boot related I’d be down until I could physically get there.

    This would also be awesome for troubleshooting some RasPi stuff where I kind of want the DE every now and then but mostly let it run headless.

  • Thanks! and agree. I’d be happy with more content but but all my reddit subs were niche things. I went out of my way to get rid of the “dopamine drip” memems and what not. Funnily enough I’ve left those on here for now because it’s not endless they way it was at reddit.

    I used RIF on mobile and RES at my desk (plus a bunch of ad blockers). So I didn’t have to deal with the noise but absolutely it is nice when the layout is about the end user and not pushing for attention.

  • So I don’t think the protest was fruitless. Sure the 48 hours blackout or whatever it was (I don’t remember) may have been dumb, but that’s how I wound up here.

    Angry, I started a community for carnivorous plants, a weird niche thing I loved reddit for. Posted a side bar talking about how it was a placeholder, forgot about it, and lo and behold, people started posting.

    I don’t think any of that would have happened without the blackout. The power mods might have had delusions that the protest would even things out and then things would return to normal, but I think the protests opened up peoples view to the fact it doesn’t need to be the way it is, and it wasn’t always that way.

    I’m also a member of an old school kind of forum around a specific kind of car that always beat the pants of the comparable subreddit.