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My Unraid NAS Backup Solution

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Pauven
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Re: My Unraid NAS Backup Solution

Post by Pauven » Sat Apr 09, 2022 4:43 pm

I just asked one of the long-time Unraid users for help on doing it the old way with UD. He's the user that originally pointed me to the instructions, and I think he's also the user who wrote the now deleted instructions.

Fingers crossed.
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Manni
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Re: My Unraid NAS Backup Solution

Post by Manni » Sat Apr 09, 2022 5:10 pm

I think you might have read too fast :)

There is really no issue as long as you don't mind the "missing drives" errors when rebooting the server without the disks, which doesn't happen often. I sue standby, so I'll never see this unless I'm changing something / doing some tests. If you don't mind that warning, there is no need to recreate anything. You create the pool, change the raid settings, do your backup (just make sure you don't copy any share to the root of the pool with the same name to avoid the error with "fix common problems"), stop the array, take the pool disks out, restart the array, done. Next time you want to use the pool, you stop the array, put the disks back (in any order), start the array, done.

Deleting the pool (and remembering the exact order of the disks when you recreate the pool) is only necessary if you mind the errors in red when the disks are absent. I don't.

Yes I'm aware about the no need to reboot/shutdown, I just wanted to simulate a worst case scenario, in case unraid remebered anything if it was the same session. Otherwise as long as the array is stopped, you can take out / put back any drives you want.

If you copy the folders from one share to the backup share, MC also does it alphabetically, as reported. I don't place to use rsync at all. Once all the data is backed-up, I'll use Allway-Sync, my mirorring software. It simply copies the changes between the source and destination, copying new/modified files and deleting deleted files. It should take too long if I do it regularly, and it's nice to be able to monitor from Windows. I use it for all my HDD backups (like the one I do from essential shares to my 10TB HDD that goes off location.

My second attempt seems to be going fine, I'm beyond 700BG, so it's past the point where it crashed previously.

I already use Unassigned Devices with the plus extension and destructive mode enabled, I can't see any option to create pools, besides the "add pool" option that I've been using for these tests. Can you see one? Where? I don't think it exists anymore, but curious to see what your friend will say :)

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Pauven
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Re: My Unraid NAS Backup Solution

Post by Pauven » Sat Apr 09, 2022 5:25 pm

Manni wrote: Sat Apr 09, 2022 5:10 pm I think you might have read too fast
Nah, not too fast. I still don't like it. From the vantagepoint of having done this with UD for 2 years, this feels like a huge step backwards.

I think there's supposed to be some compatibility between UD's pool and Unraid's pool. It might be that now you've created it, you can unplug the drives, delete the pool, plug the drives back in, then mount them in UD instead.

I do not see the option to create the pool in UD, but that might be what the command line accomplished. But like I mentioned, I don't have any spare drives at the moment to play with. I might be able to go into my discard pile of bad drives and find a couple that are still good enough to play with.

Johnnie's normally pretty quick on the forum, so we may have an answer this weekend. I'll do some more research in the meantime. I'm getting concerned because I need to expand my existing pool with a new drive, and now I'm not sure how to do this...
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Re: My Unraid NAS Backup Solution

Post by Pauven » Sat Apr 09, 2022 5:54 pm

Ok, I found this: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/75960-c ... ices-pool/

This person is working through a typo, and has posted the commands. He's doing a RAID1 pool, so not exactly what we need, but I think we can reverse engineer what's going on.

The first part is adding devices (drives) to the filesystem. The command format for that is "btrfs dev add [options] <device> [<device>...] <path>". For the options, we want to do a force overwrite of the existing filesystem on the disk, so -f. Then list the drives, then the target path. I think I did something like this to add my 5 drives:

Code: Select all

btrfs dev add -f /dev/sdx1 /dev/sdy1 /dev/sdz1 /dev/sdaa1 /dev/sdab1 /dev/sdac1 /mnt/disks/Frankenstore
Note that I think I used sdx1 instead of sdx, as sdx is the drive, and sdx1 is the 1st partition (from what I recall). This might mean that you have to create the partitions first. I obviously have 5 partitions, named Frankenstore, Frankenstore_D2, Frankenstore_D3, Frankenstore_D4, and Frankenstore_D5, so there's a good chance I created those first, then did the command above to add them. But I could be wrong about all this, I just don't remember now...

Also keep in mind that your drive letters will be different than the one's I used in my command example. Just grab the drive letters from Unassigned Devices.

Now, there's a real possibility the above commands are different than what I used. Looking at the btrfs wiki (https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php ... le_Devices), this page shows the commands above, but also shows creating a filesystem with mkfs.btrfs, something like this:

Code: Select all

mkfs.btrfs -d single /dev/sdx1 /dev/sdy1 /dev/sdz1 /dev/sdaa1 /dev/sdab1 /dev/sdac1 
mount /dev/sdx /mnt/disks/Frankenstore
That takes the 5 drives and joins them into a single filesystem, exactly what you want. The problem with this approach is I don't see how I got to my drive specific Frankenstore_Dx partition names, so I have my doubts that this is what I did. Maybe I renamed the partitions afterwards...

Many of the examples show using a balance command, but I don't think we need that for a single, non-RAID pool.

Since you have the drives to play with, you may want to try some of the above and see if you can get it to work.
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Manni
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Re: My Unraid NAS Backup Solution

Post by Manni » Sat Apr 09, 2022 6:08 pm

I still don’t think it’s as bad as you make it, but I’m going in the other direction: I managed to rescucitate my Synology, so I’m going back to plan A and reclaiming all my bays and 6TB drives in the A server. It’s good to know that I can create a pool in an emergency if needed, but I far prefer the external Synology solution, if only because it allows me to get 70-80TB from unused drives, depending on whether I decide to go for JBOD, RAID5 or RAID6. I think I might go for RAID5, that allows me to lose one drive per storage pool (I’ll have one storage pool of 12x4TB and one storage pool of 12x3TB). That means two drives in two arrays, sounds good enough for a backup.
Last edited by Manni on Sat Apr 09, 2022 6:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: My Unraid NAS Backup Solution

Post by Manni » Sat Apr 09, 2022 6:17 pm

In the end I decided to go for a single SHR volume over the 24 disks, that gives me protection for 1 disk loss and 72TB effective storage in total. It uses all the storage on all disks, only losing one disk of the largest capacity (so 4 TB in my case) for redundancy/parity. I wouldn’t do this for my main storage, but for a backup NAS I think that’s fine.

Manni
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Re: My Unraid NAS Backup Solution

Post by Manni » Sat Apr 09, 2022 7:00 pm

I did one last test after deleting the pool, following your suggestion/question, I tried to mount the first disk using UD, it does report the total size ofr the pool (used size/free size) correctly but it doesn't mount the other disks, so I don't think that a pool created by Unraid can be mounted with UD:
Mounting deleted pool.JPG
Mounting deleted pool.JPG (248.13 KiB) Viewed 10110 times
I'm stopping the experiments with this as I don't need the backup pool on Unraid anymore, but I'll keep an eye here in case your friend comes back with useful info, for future use.

EDIT: I spoke too fast. I tried mounting the other disks manually, and they say "pool" once mounted. So it looks like this might work.
Other disks.JPG
Other disks.JPG (260.08 KiB) Viewed 10102 times
So if the pool can be used like this, it means that the main difference is that you have to manually mount all the disks, vs UD mounting all the disks automatically when you mount the first one (as it is my understanding that this is the way it works for you currently).
Last edited by Manni on Sat Apr 09, 2022 7:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Manni
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Re: My Unraid NAS Backup Solution

Post by Manni » Sat Apr 09, 2022 7:05 pm

Corrected wrong screenshot in previous post.

Manni
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Re: My Unraid NAS Backup Solution

Post by Manni » Sat Apr 09, 2022 7:11 pm

Following the above posts, I checked the content of the UD mounted deleted pool, and if I go to "disks" in MC, the backup share is present in any of the disks part of the pool, but the pool doesn't appear as a single pool.

Also if you unmount the first disk, all the other disk remain with "pool" greyed out, and there is no way to unmount them.

So using UD to use a pool created by Unraid doesn't seem to be a good idea...

Jamie
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Re: My Unraid NAS Backup Solution

Post by Jamie » Sat Apr 09, 2022 8:34 pm

Hi Paul,

I will try the information which you placed here for pooling Unassigned drives. I don't want to muck up the array with pooling the drives in the array and the unassigned drive pooling is exactly what I want. It might be a few months from now but I will get to it. I have copied the information you placed here and put it in my unraid document with the information from the unraid thread. I like placing things I find on the web into documents because I find that web sites go down and threads get deleted as you found out searching for the unassigned drive pooling info.

Thanks for your efforts
Last edited by Jamie on Sat Apr 09, 2022 8:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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