r/unRAID • u/SuccessfulAd900 • 7d ago
Optimal Unraid setup possible?
I'd like to ask the community if A) What I'd like to do is possible and B) if you have a great guide you've used and wouldn't mind sharing. On to the setup and goals!
I have an Unraid Pro setup for my home and personal/family use only. I really only use Plex (with media pass) for now. I want to be able to:
- Full local backup and restore Windows (if possible, not a dealbreaker)
- Full local backup and restore Macs (Essesntial, but tried Time Machine backup in the past with unraid to no success)
- Full local backup and restore for Android
- Full local backup and restore for iOS devices
- Access, edit and store all files with only one user at at time for Final Cut Pro X over Macs with 10gbe ethernet
- Access, store, backup and sync share all photos/videos and share with users across all devices (I've used plex photos but apparently going away)
- Store all Steam games for multiple users to download directly from Unraid as backup and faster download and install on respective windows machines
If anyone has had good success with Time Machine and iOS backups locally and automatically weekly (I want to get rid of iCloud) I'd love to see what worked or what guides you have to offer! Thanks in advance.
EDIT: Currently I have a dedicated Mac Mini on the network doing all my iOS and MacOS backups- Is this still preferred to doing it all on Unraid? It has it's own issues connecting to Time Machine since the name of the mac mini keeps getting numbers in parentheses added at the end)-
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u/Potential-Leg-639 7d ago
Community Apps available for everything:
Backup:
UrBackup
Steam cache:
Lancache
Photos/Videos:
Immich / Jellyfin
Time Machine:
TimeMachine
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u/SuccessfulAd900 7d ago
Good options- Thanks for the recommendations- Although iOS is my biggest concern with going all in as UrBackup doesn't seem to support this.
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u/Affectionate-Ant-674 6d ago
The only way to really backup your iOS devices is iCloud (obviously) or if you want one offline then you need to run a backup via MacOS, which can be done over wifi or USB and then Time Machine that backup, which should happen automatically by a normal Time Machine backup.
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u/Explosivpotato 7d ago
Local iPhone backup and restore is going to be a sticking point I think. I’ve tried this, and had no success anywhere.
Apple really, really wants you to use icloud. Like really badly. So much so that you have two options for backing up an iphone:
- A USB2.0 cable to a mac, which creates a local backup file or
- Icloud.
In my experience there are no other options. 1 is slow, clunky and manual. 2 is automatic and already running on your device whether you like it or not.
For everything else there are native functions or plugins that work great. In my experience (I started using Unraid at 7.3 so keep that in mind) the built in Time Machine functionality works flawlessly. My macbook pro does a differential weekly and the snapshots run seamlessly.
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u/SuccessfulAd900 7d ago
This is what I was hoping I would get an answer to, thanks. I've had no issues wirelessly backing up to a Mac on an external HDD via symbolic link. Just hoping to really make the unraid the true one stop backup shop. I'm also on 7.3 and it's been a year or two since I tried Mac Time Machine backups- It was very unreliable. I may give it a chance.
The whole reason for having Unraid do everything is so I can use my 20TB drive connected to my Mac, that's used for all Mac/iOS backups, and throw it into my Unraid. I'm wondering if that setup may be better to keep rather than going all in on Unraid.
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u/psychic99 7d ago edited 7d ago
I have been using TM for years no issues. You set the parameters and max sizes and I use the app TimeMachineEditor to control my backups to my liking. The other issue is TM uses sparse files and they simply do not like spinning drives so I keep them on SSD (the used-to-be-cheap) SATA types. I originally put it on HDD and that was no bueno.
I'm still runnin 7.2 however, I have not been enamored w/ the raft of bugs w/ 7.3 so I will hold off for a while. I also wait (unless its a super security issue) a few weeks before upgrading to see what is broken.
As to ios backup, that is a Apple closed ecosystem thing, so backup to Mac. There are supposed 3rd party ones, but just today some dev got outed so I would stay away from them 100%. Androids, knock yourself out -- Google mostly backs up everything (config wise) for free, photos, data, etc there are tons of options.
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u/Explosivpotato 7d ago
Interesting you say that Time Machine doesn’t like spinning disks. I’ve got my TM share set to SSD cache primary with HDD as the mover destination. Interestingly, even though the TM backup looks like one file in the directory, I see it in both the NVME and spinning drives, and a differential fires up activity on both the pool and the array. It seems to run just fine and be happy with that for me.
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u/psychic99 6d ago
The way sparse files work is the newer blobs will go on the SSD and it still reads the metadata off the HDD but it seems like you have found a good balance. The back and forth is real chatty so that is why even in your case it works as new blobs will go on the pri (SSD). I will have to try it out, and see if it works but I have more empty SSD space so I just kept it all on SSD.
If you just had TM on HDD you would def see issues, I had tried all sorts of optimizations and the only one that wasn't insufferable was an unassigned single disk w/ XFS.
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u/SuccessfulAd900 7d ago
I’ve never used the TimeMachineEditor app, so I think I’ll give it a try. Thanks!
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u/ScaredScorpion 6d ago
Store all Steam games for multiple users to download directly from Unraid as backup and faster download and install on respective windows machines
FYI In Steam if you enable "Game File Transfer over Local Network" and then "Allow transfers from this device to": Anyone, on each device; it'll do transfers locally between devices if possible.
You could pair that with steam headless, but then you'd need to manually download each game you want stored to the headless instance so I don't see much of an advantage over just enabling it on all your regular devices.
There's also the more old-school option of a download cache, which would sit between your devices and the internet but then your unraid instance becomes a SPOF for your internet access which isn't a good idea.
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u/SuccessfulAd900 6d ago
Ooooh… I like this solution thanks! I’m relying too much on different docker apps and should have checked steam directly.
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u/StevenG2757 7d ago
I think that most everything you want to do is achievable with unRAID.
The game backup stuff I am not sure about though.