Unraid & Moving Data (Part 1) File System

hi guys and welcome to another video so this video continues in the unraid 6.9 series and today we're going to be looking at transferring data we're going to be looking at transferring data to from and inside an unraid server so if that sounds interesting then let's get started so you've finally finished building your own raid server so now's the time we need to be thinking about the easiest quickest and the best ways to transfer data to from and inside and around the server now when i first started making this video i thought it was just going to be one video about moving data around unknown raid but by the time i'd finished the video i saw is almost an hour long and now no one wants to watch an hour long video so i decided to re-edit it and cut it into five parts so now because this small little mini series is all finished i'm going to be uploading all of the parts over this weekend now the last video i uploaded was in my unraid 6.9 series and that video took us to the point showing us how to set up the shares as efficiently as possible on the new server so it makes sense for this video to move on forwards and look at multiple different ways which we can move data to the server and also once we've got data on the server different ways we can move it around but this video isn't just for people who have recently set up an unraid server there are techniques in this video even if you've been using unraid for a while you might find useful to use but if you are a new unraid user and you've just finished building your first unraid server then it's not going to have any data on it at all but the chances are is you've got another nas computer or just a hard drive you need to transfer the data from onto the new server and obviously we want to use the best way to do this we want to be quick and easy no messing around so let's go on to the server in the last video which we are setting up and make a start so like i said there's no data on this server yes we have set up the shares but there's nothing on them at all so in these videos this weekend we're going to be looking at four different ways to move and transfer files on our unread server we're going to be looking at a docker container called crusader and crusader will let us copy and move files from within a web gui we'll be looking at a method what i call using a root share using a root chair will let us copy and move files straight from our pc using its own file manager for example finder on the mac or on windows 10 windows file explorer we'll be looking at a command line tool that's built into unraid called rsync and finally another command line tool this one having a built-in gui quite similar to crusader which is also built into unraid called midnight commander now all of these tools have their own pros and cons and when we look at them i'll try and point out what those are but a lot of the time it will just come down to your personal choice and what works best for you so obviously someone who's never used command line before they might feel a bit uncomfortable with it so prefer to use something like crusader or the root share method but before we go and look at anything at all i think it's really important we have a quick look at how the unraid file system works because it will make things much easier to understand if you're familiar with that but actually before we start there's two plugins that we should check that are installed so on the apps tab just type in unassigned and you should have unassigned devices installed as well as your unassigned devices plus add-on the plus add-on gives us file support for hfs and exfat so it's important that we have this enabled so on the unraid operating system all of the files are under the location of what's called the mount point forward slash mnt for example if i go and look on disk one here clicking this icon allows me to view the files which are on disk one and here we can see the location it's forward slash mnt forward slash disk one so here i can see the contents of disk 1 and the location of the files and again i can see the same for disk 2 and disk 3 and also the cache drives you can see here the location of this cache drive is forward slash mnt forward slash cash underscore nvme so the location of all physical disks on unraid is in forward slash mnt and then the name of the disk so that's the disks now let's look at the location of the shares so obviously all of these shares are spread across the disks and if i click on here where it says app data and click on to view it will show me the location so this share is forward slash mnt forward slash user forward slash app data so this first part here the forward slash mnt forward slash user this is the location where all of the shares are so every single share on unraid will be under forward slash mnt forward slash user so if i go to my movie share here this share is in the same location as is my tv shows share as well so all unraid shares can be found under forward slash mnt forward slash user forward slash then the name of the share okay so that's the location of the unread disks and the unraid shares but how about when we plug an external hard drive in as an unassigned disk where's the location that unraid keeps that so to answer that i'm going to plug an external usb hard drive in as an unassigned disk okay so there it is so i'm going to click on some mounts to mount the drive and now if i click on this cross here and look inside the drive we can see the location here is forward slash mnt forward slash disks as in disks plural and then the name of the drive so on unraid all of the unassigned disks whether it's a usb external hard drive an extra sata disk a usb flash drive or even an sd card it'll be in the location forward slash mnt forward slash disks followed by the name of the drive now the unassigned devices plugin not only allows you to connect external disks but it also allows you to connect remote smb or nfs shares so let's connect to remote share now and then we can see the location where unraid mounts that share so i'm going to choose the windows icon here for an smb share and i'm going to search for a server now here where it says choose server now just because it says choose server this doesn't actually mean it has to be a real server it could just be a windows pc with an smb share and if the share you want to connect to is password protected you need to put in the username and password here and if the share's on the domain you can put the domain in here mine isn't so now i'm going to click load shares and this is actually another unraid server so i'm going to choose the share here app data so i've connected to the app data share on another server and i'm going to click on to mount here and i click onto the name of the share here and we can see the location as is everything in unraid forward slash mnt but then it's forward slash remotes and then the name of the remote share so that's the basic structure of the unraid file system for disks shares and unassigned devices but just to recap let's open the terminal window and i'm going to type ls to list out the files forward slash mnt and enter so in the folder mnt we can see all the unread disks shares and remotes here are the cache pools cache nvme cache protected cache ssd and the array disks this one two and three next we've got disks plural which is all the unassigned disk connected to the server then remotes all the connected remote shares and then user here this is all of the unread shares made up of the content of all of the array disks and all of the cache pulls now next to this folder we can see here where it says user zero so you may be wondering just what's the difference between user and user xero while user zero is also all of the shares but only made up of what's on the array disks and not including the data that's on the cache pools so i'm going to say you should ignore user zero all of your shares the complete shares in the folder user and this last folder here vm's nvme well that's my last cache drive okay so that's enough talk about how android structures its data so now let's talk about some of the kind of practical implications when moving data around so you might be thinking well i can copy all of my data onto my new unraid server just using my pc and the network yeah i can just browse the network and find the server open the share i want to copy the data to and just copy and paste across to that yeah so the speed i'm transferring the data to the server to this share is based on two factors one is the type of share that it is and if you saw my last video when i set up my movie's share you'll know that this share is not cash enabled so what that means is the rights are slower than they would be to a cash enabled share because there's two rights happening one to the parity disk and one to the data disk and both of these are mechanical drives and the second thing that's going to affect the speed is obviously the network transferring files over the network will be affected by the network speed i'm transferring through a lan cable but transferring by wi-fi in most cases will probably be slower so when just transferring a few files this isn't really a problem i started transferring seven gigs of data and it's just going to take a couple of minutes to go across but what we need to think about is what happens when we transfer really large amounts of data across not just a few gigs but maybe a few terabytes of data well this is going to take a long time and also it's possible during the transfer there might be an error like the connection might drop and halfway through transferring your data the copy is just going to stop and you're not going to know how much data you've copied across and how much you haven't also think of a situation where you might have an existing nas and you want to transfer the data from that to the new unraid server and you've got your laptop now normally you log into the navs with your laptop and transfer files to and from so you're thinking well i can log into the nas on the laptop and transfer the data to the new server now yeah okay this would actually work but it's certainly not the best way to do it because remember the data isn't going straight from the nas to the unraid server it's going across via the network to the laptop first and kind of stopping off there and then onto the unraid server so it's kind of like when you get a flight somewhere and it's not a direct flight and you've got a stop over somewhere else the direct route is always the more efficient and fastest way and in fact we can also have a similar situation when using our desktop pc or laptop when we want to move data from one share to another so say we've got two map network drives on our windows pc to two separate shares on the unraid server and you've decided you want to move a file from one share to another now again it's not a direct route it's going via the laptop and then back to the server to the other share so not as fast as it would be if it just physically moved from one chair to the other but all of these problems are possible for us to overcome them and that's what we're going to be looking at next so the quickest way we can transfer our data to the unraid server is not via the network but if possible by physically connecting the hard drive to the unraid server this can be plugging the hard drive directly into a sata port or you can use a usb adapter sata to usb to get the same job done i really like these dual innertech ones for doing this they're also a hard drive cloner as well i'll leave an amazon link in the description in case you want to buy one the link is an affiliate link but it won't cost you any more to buy it through my link it just means that uncle jeff will give me a few pennies for recommending it to you now i know it's not always possible to connect the hard drive directly to the unraid server you might not want to open your pc or laptop and take out the drive you may have another nas where the data is raided so taking out an individual disk wouldn't do any good anyway but don't worry we will be looking at the best way to transfer the data from these devices across the network but for now let's move on and look at the first method of copying data using the docker container crusader but now as this video is going to be in parts then i'm sorry you're going to have to wait to the next video for us to look at crusader but don't worry you're not gonna have to wait very long because all of these videos are gonna be uploaded over this weekend but for now if you like this video then please hit the like button and if you're new to the channel then please subscribe and to all of my patrons and supporters who are watching thank you so much guys for all of your support i really appreciate it and if anyone watching would like to join those great bunch of people and help support the channel then please see the links in the description below anyway guys it's time for me to go now but whatever you're up to for the rest of the day i hope it's good and i'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Spaceinvader One

Views: 16,026

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Id: JXqmbYtyv9g

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021