I've been running backups awhile now - nothing unusual - UrBackup on the UNRAID server to backup my desktop and its (seven?) volumes, and TimeMachine (also on the UNRAID server) to backup my Minis and (more importantly) the MacBook Pro - which is only connected to TimeMachine when I am on my personal VPN which allows me to connect to the UNRAID shares at home (and subsequent Windows shares through UNRAID) when I am away, which these days is more often than not. Given the storage capacity of the MacBook, I do most of my audio/video (but not AI) work on the UNRAID shares over VPN, which translates into TimeMachine not being able to assist much in that regard as it doesn't cover remote-mounted volumes (though it does cover the USB-attached volume).

I was working on the graphic below, which contains less than 20 layers, and was saving the PSD file frequently. During one of my last saves I received a "disk error" message, so saved it again - that one went through - then closed the file. As it turns out, the save wasn't successful and I was unable to open it later. I tried a variety of tools which were supposed to work, but didn't, before I remembered I had backups. I logged into the UrBackup GUI (located on the UNRAID server), selected the approximate time of the last known good backup (I've since changed it to two days worth of hourly incremental), and successfully restored my layered PSD. First chance I've had to test my restores, and I was thrilled it was so smooth and easy!

It wasn't really fun, or easy, or even really necessary if we're being honest. Mostly because UNRAID isn't much of a hypervisor, and I'm really not into that whole "Docker" thing - which looks freaking awesome if it like, worked and stuff. But I'm a sysadmin - I have needs. Things like access, and tools, and the ability to manipulate things outside their intended purpose. Dockers don't really have that. So I used VMs, but again, UNRAID is not much of a hypervisor which made things difficult. Geekfriend migrated her minecraft server from my R610 to her UNRAID, mostly because COX can eat a bag of dicks. That meant at some point, I'd likely poweroff the minecraft server. And really, the only things running on the ESX host are my bastion (openBSD) and my DNS server (rocky linux), neither of which require many resources. Figured running them on UNRAID would be non-impactful. What I didn't plan on doing was spending most of the day and all night getting something relatively easy to work. Enter the Story of my Life.

Anyway, upgraded openBSD from 6.6 to 7.5 while I was at it, and traded in rocky linux for openSUSE 15.6. What gave me the most difficulty was qemu, which UNRAID runs as it's built-in hypervisor, so I was unfamiliar with....well, just about everything.

Anyway, its done. I have a 14TB drive arriving tomorrow, which is going to be a huge pain in the ass because your parity drive has to be the largest one (the reason I only bought 12TB drives for so long) and migrating that much data is a pain in the ass. Just in case (and because Geekfriend did it also) I'm upgrading from 16GB of RAM to 64GB because running Dockers and VMs requires more than just idling storage - the idea being, I've managed to consolidate my entire homelab into a single box I could lift and ship at a moment's notice.

We'll see.