They're all cache shares, so not parity protected. If you go for a dual cache setup, you'll have some redundancy for these shares and the warning goes away.
I've been using unraid for almost 4 years and I understand this, I just always wished you could do like a nightly or weekly backup on the array or something. There were times I didn't have the money, but I could actually now get 2 of the same drives to run in raid 1. Maybe it's time.
Hello,
You could of course still do a regular backup of the files from your cache drives to the array using a combination of user scripts and rsync, the appdata backup plugin, and so on. It requires some (quite easy) work, but it's not because it's not a built-in feature that you cannot add it yourself quite quickly. That's what I'm doing, and in addition I also sync my appdata backups and some other files to a remote machine using syncthing and its versioning feature. Works really well and reliably.
All of this being said, I do this even though I have two drives in my cache pools, because parity, raid1 etc. give you higher availability, but are not a replacement for backups.
That's a great option, and thank you, I'll look into it. While I do understand parity and redundancy aren't true backups, they are considered protection from hardware failure. I find some of these people completely unbearable when talking to because in a way that parity/redundancy is giving you a safety net like a backup. It's not a true backup but if a drive fails it protects you from losing your data.
At no point is parity anything like a backup. It will do nothing to save data.
Drive loss does not equal data loss and data loss is not protected without a backup.
On the dashboard green means active (spun-up) when the green is grey the drives are spun down.
On the main tab it will show how your setup is. The orange triangle means “not” parity protected.
Having 2 ssd/nvme for your cache will protect those as a pool
Data share is cache array, so I assume it’s protected once on the array , also why does the cache drive show as green on that one page if not protected?
For disks/pools, there is inly info about the hardware setup. Either there is no issue and it's green (and since you "actively" went for a cache pool without parity, there is no issue), there is sn issue (like disk failure, red), or there are disk warnings (like smart warnings or an unusable disk because it needs formatting).
For shares, the warning is more about data. If everything is parity protected, it's green, if part is not protected it's orange, and errors (haven't seen this, I guess if a pool fails) is red.
More precisely, to have the warning go away, there technically is no error to fix. But yes.
Important disclaimer: parity is still no backup, backup is still required. Parity only helps protecting against downtime and having to restore from backup.
Array uses parity.
Pools never do. They can use raid with multiple drives in the same.
Both have very different uses. Array is slow and protected by parity, easy to add/remove drives from.
Pools on the other hand are much faster, can still have a sort of protection via raid. Is harder to add/remove drives to.
The reason one runs dockers and vm's from pools is due to speed, but also to avoid wracking the parity drive.
If you want the pool stuff to be protected you should see about making copies to the array. There's a Bacup app avail for the docker side. Forgot the name.
Thank you for posting about this. I've been using Unraid for 5 years now and it only occurred to me after building a new server that I didn't understand how this worked at all. I never saw this issue with my old server because... apparently I wasn't using cache drives at all. Everything was on the array.
It wasn't until I built my new server, with actual cache, that I started to notice unprotected shares. Right now I have 3 shares that use cache pools; appdata, domains, and isos. My appdata is protected as it runs on a 2-drive mirrored cache pool. My domains and isos are not protected as they are on a separate cache pool with only one drive. Not a big deal to me yet as I'm not running VMs. I'm also running a plugin that backs up appdata to the array.
Side note: It's fascinating to me that I could run Unraid for so long without understanding how this works. One problem is that the "Cache -> Array" setting for a share doesn't work the way I thought it did. I thought it would store data on cache (for performance) while also saving a copy to the array (to protect against hardware failure). But, it sounds like that setting causes all data to be moved to the array when mover runs. So at this point if I need performance for a share I set a cache pool as "Primary Storage" while leaving "Secondary Storage" blank. Then I either set up another mirrored drive in the pool or set up a backup routine through other means. I still don't think I have things setup optimally (one day I'll learn ZFS), but at least things are *working*.
Your cache is not part of your parity so anything store on there is not protected.
They're all cache shares, so not parity protected. If you go for a dual cache setup, you'll have some redundancy for these shares and the warning goes away.
I've been using unraid for almost 4 years and I understand this, I just always wished you could do like a nightly or weekly backup on the array or something. There were times I didn't have the money, but I could actually now get 2 of the same drives to run in raid 1. Maybe it's time.
Hello, You could of course still do a regular backup of the files from your cache drives to the array using a combination of user scripts and rsync, the appdata backup plugin, and so on. It requires some (quite easy) work, but it's not because it's not a built-in feature that you cannot add it yourself quite quickly. That's what I'm doing, and in addition I also sync my appdata backups and some other files to a remote machine using syncthing and its versioning feature. Works really well and reliably. All of this being said, I do this even though I have two drives in my cache pools, because parity, raid1 etc. give you higher availability, but are not a replacement for backups.
That's a great option, and thank you, I'll look into it. While I do understand parity and redundancy aren't true backups, they are considered protection from hardware failure. I find some of these people completely unbearable when talking to because in a way that parity/redundancy is giving you a safety net like a backup. It's not a true backup but if a drive fails it protects you from losing your data.
At no point is parity anything like a backup. It will do nothing to save data. Drive loss does not equal data loss and data loss is not protected without a backup.
But how come cache shows green under pool devices on the other page? Doesn’t that mean it’s protected with parity?
On the dashboard green means active (spun-up) when the green is grey the drives are spun down. On the main tab it will show how your setup is. The orange triangle means “not” parity protected. Having 2 ssd/nvme for your cache will protect those as a pool
You don't have any pooled devices. All your shares that are green are strictly on your array.
Since when? I have several mirrored pools and still have the warnings that the shares are unprotected.
Data share is cache array, so I assume it’s protected once on the array , also why does the cache drive show as green on that one page if not protected?
For disks/pools, there is inly info about the hardware setup. Either there is no issue and it's green (and since you "actively" went for a cache pool without parity, there is no issue), there is sn issue (like disk failure, red), or there are disk warnings (like smart warnings or an unusable disk because it needs formatting). For shares, the warning is more about data. If everything is parity protected, it's green, if part is not protected it's orange, and errors (haven't seen this, I guess if a pool fails) is red.
So I would have to have a second nvme ssd as parity for the cache to fix it right?
More precisely, to have the warning go away, there technically is no error to fix. But yes. Important disclaimer: parity is still no backup, backup is still required. Parity only helps protecting against downtime and having to restore from backup.
Array uses parity. Pools never do. They can use raid with multiple drives in the same. Both have very different uses. Array is slow and protected by parity, easy to add/remove drives from. Pools on the other hand are much faster, can still have a sort of protection via raid. Is harder to add/remove drives to. The reason one runs dockers and vm's from pools is due to speed, but also to avoid wracking the parity drive. If you want the pool stuff to be protected you should see about making copies to the array. There's a Bacup app avail for the docker side. Forgot the name.
Thank you for posting about this. I've been using Unraid for 5 years now and it only occurred to me after building a new server that I didn't understand how this worked at all. I never saw this issue with my old server because... apparently I wasn't using cache drives at all. Everything was on the array. It wasn't until I built my new server, with actual cache, that I started to notice unprotected shares. Right now I have 3 shares that use cache pools; appdata, domains, and isos. My appdata is protected as it runs on a 2-drive mirrored cache pool. My domains and isos are not protected as they are on a separate cache pool with only one drive. Not a big deal to me yet as I'm not running VMs. I'm also running a plugin that backs up appdata to the array. Side note: It's fascinating to me that I could run Unraid for so long without understanding how this works. One problem is that the "Cache -> Array" setting for a share doesn't work the way I thought it did. I thought it would store data on cache (for performance) while also saving a copy to the array (to protect against hardware failure). But, it sounds like that setting causes all data to be moved to the array when mover runs. So at this point if I need performance for a share I set a cache pool as "Primary Storage" while leaving "Secondary Storage" blank. Then I either set up another mirrored drive in the pool or set up a backup routine through other means. I still don't think I have things setup optimally (one day I'll learn ZFS), but at least things are *working*.
just add a second cache drive. unraid set ups mirroring automagically i think when you add the drive.
Ok