How is Unraid? I’ve been meaning to build a backup PC for my folks out of spare parts and I’ve been wondering what I should install on it.
I’d like it to start with a couple of mirrored HDDs, and have two writable Samba shares. One for random stuff and discardable stuff like music and movies, and one for important files where they’d put their photos and documents and which would get incremental backups with something like borg.
I can set this up on Debian ofc but it’s not a bad idea for it to be an OS that doesn’t need arcane knowledge to add/replace HDDs when needed.
I love it for ease of use. It’s very straightforward, has given me few (if any) problems over the years on the OS level. The only real issues I ran into were specific to individual docker images. I like that I can open a web UI and jump right into the shell if needed. It’s very easy to install docker images and VMs
However, there is a caveat about how it stores data I suppose. Your use case of mirroring drives is not possible on unRAID. Instead, it uses one drive for parity and redundancy, or you can do dual parity if you’re really concerned about data loss. Basically how this works is your largest drive stores all the information about all the other drives to rebuild the data in case of drive failure, including the parity drive itself can be rebuilt if it fails. So say you had a 12 TB parity drive and a dozen or so other drives for the array. All of those drives can be literally anything so long as they are the same size or smaller than the parity. They can be 12 TB, 8 TB, 500 MB, old drives you shucked out of external storage cases, whatever. And you can add / remove these at will. The parity does not count to your max amount of storage, think of it like a mirror but for every other drive
Dual parity is an extra level of redundancy. It’s basically like say you had a drive fail, and in those couple days where you order a new one or whatever, or when the data is rebuilding itself, if another drive fails, your data is still in tact. I don’t bother because this would be such a rare occurrence. I do know data rebuilds are very high read/writes for days on a drive so it can be high stress on the drive so that’s why the extra protection exists, but I still think it’s overkill unless it’s like irreplaceable data you can’t lose (remember 3-2-1 backups in those cases)
How is Unraid? I’ve been meaning to build a backup PC for my folks out of spare parts and I’ve been wondering what I should install on it.
I’d like it to start with a couple of mirrored HDDs, and have two writable Samba shares. One for random stuff and discardable stuff like music and movies, and one for important files where they’d put their photos and documents and which would get incremental backups with something like borg.
I can set this up on Debian ofc but it’s not a bad idea for it to be an OS that doesn’t need arcane knowledge to add/replace HDDs when needed.
I love it for ease of use. It’s very straightforward, has given me few (if any) problems over the years on the OS level. The only real issues I ran into were specific to individual docker images. I like that I can open a web UI and jump right into the shell if needed. It’s very easy to install docker images and VMs
However, there is a caveat about how it stores data I suppose. Your use case of mirroring drives is not possible on unRAID. Instead, it uses one drive for parity and redundancy, or you can do dual parity if you’re really concerned about data loss. Basically how this works is your largest drive stores all the information about all the other drives to rebuild the data in case of drive failure, including the parity drive itself can be rebuilt if it fails. So say you had a 12 TB parity drive and a dozen or so other drives for the array. All of those drives can be literally anything so long as they are the same size or smaller than the parity. They can be 12 TB, 8 TB, 500 MB, old drives you shucked out of external storage cases, whatever. And you can add / remove these at will. The parity does not count to your max amount of storage, think of it like a mirror but for every other drive
Dual parity is an extra level of redundancy. It’s basically like say you had a drive fail, and in those couple days where you order a new one or whatever, or when the data is rebuilding itself, if another drive fails, your data is still in tact. I don’t bother because this would be such a rare occurrence. I do know data rebuilds are very high read/writes for days on a drive so it can be high stress on the drive so that’s why the extra protection exists, but I still think it’s overkill unless it’s like irreplaceable data you can’t lose (remember 3-2-1 backups in those cases)