Re: My Unraid NAS Backup Solution
Posted: Sun Apr 10, 2022 1:09 pm
I definitely agree that for such a high number of smaller drives, your approach is really the only viable solution. My USB drive stack approach really only works if you're buying the biggest possible drives, to keep the total stack small. Even then, your total storage is so large that you'd need 8 of those 18tb drives, so quite a large drive stack. I only had old 3TB drives on hand, and not nearly enough to come close to backing up my array, which is why I bought new drives for the backup pool. I'm excited for 20TB external USB drives to hit the market at a decent price, but if I had to splurge now, I'd go with an 18TB unit.
Regarding your comment on creating partitions at the command line, for the steps above the creating of partitions is done with UD in the GUI. The command line only adds an existing partition to an existing pool. I definitely agree with trepidation on using diskpart and similar tools, I always hated that and I don't miss those days at all.
The guy who maintains UD seems pretty active on support - I see updates on that plugin near constantly. Perhaps I can encourage him to add some pool management into the GUI. Would be nice to not have to go to the command line to add a disk to the pool, and nicer yet if the GUI reflected that those drives were already in-use when you mount the pool. I'm sure he's focused on other aspects of UD now that Unraid supports multiple pools, but maybe he'd be willing considering UD is better at removable pools.
Regarding your comment on creating partitions at the command line, for the steps above the creating of partitions is done with UD in the GUI. The command line only adds an existing partition to an existing pool. I definitely agree with trepidation on using diskpart and similar tools, I always hated that and I don't miss those days at all.
The guy who maintains UD seems pretty active on support - I see updates on that plugin near constantly. Perhaps I can encourage him to add some pool management into the GUI. Would be nice to not have to go to the command line to add a disk to the pool, and nicer yet if the GUI reflected that those drives were already in-use when you mount the pool. I'm sure he's focused on other aspects of UD now that Unraid supports multiple pools, but maybe he'd be willing considering UD is better at removable pools.