unRAID

[crokett]

We had a backups thread recently, and here's another one. I got a scare yesterday. I was configuring the synch utility to synch my XP laptop to my Linux desktop and managed to set the permissions on my entire home directory in Linux to read only by root and no access to any one else. It is very scary when you are looking at files and they all disappear. It only took a minute or so to figure out the files weren't actually gone and fix things but it was scary. It also took about an hour to unravel the permissions mess under XP. I now have things working and can back up my work machines to each other, but my home desktop needs a backup So, I am planning on using this:

unRAID

It is a custom version of Linux that gives you a network appliance with RAID supprt if you want it. I will put the OS on a USB key and reserve the internal drives for the data.

[LinuxRandal]

I don't see it listed as working with the atom processor, itx boards (yet), but I may just have to try it. Thanks (plan is to build a low power nas box)

[Kristofor]

I use unRaid for a 16TB video server at my house. In that role it's a good choice. It's fast enough for streaming HD content to my players, but still relatively slow. I could always re-rip my collection, but that would take a lot of time. The design that allows the recovery of a failed drive from parity is pretty standard, but the fact that all data isn't lost in the event of multiple simultaneous failures (only the data on the drives that fail is lost) was a significant consideration.

Some other little tidbits. The write performance is very slow unless you use a cache drive, this isn't something you'd want to use as a shared file server for a business. There is a pretty helpful community on the official forums. Folks have developed documentation about how to run unraid on a standard slackware install so if you want one always-on box for multiple purposes you can do that, as well as a standard package structure for loading additional functionality on the flash drive.