Unraid recently released 7.0.0, a major version that brought a good chunk of changes.
If you run Unraid at home, you might consider upgrading. The process is simple enough. Right? Sure. But have you considered why you are upgrading? What are you gaining? What will you lose? Are you safe in the case of a failed upgrade?
I discuss much of this in my video but this post is a written form of those thoughts in case you prefer it.
Is it ready?
Major versions are big and scary. Is there a “right time” to actually upgrade?
The short answer is no. However, with a release schedule like Unraid, you are relatively safe to upgrade after the full release of a major version. The reason for this is because of their extensive rc pattern. No, not Remote Controlled cars. I mean Release Candidates.
Unraid publishes RC versions of their upgrades to beta testers long before releasing the whole upgrade as an official release. What this means for you is that the upgrade has been tested a lot prior to you being prompted to upgrade.
Why upgrade?
So you decided to proceed, why?
Major versions include a lot of updates. Some of those include updated linux kernel, new dashboard pages, and improvements to features like NFS and Samba.
A list of all changes and updates is available here on Unraid’s documentation site.
There are some security updates, so that is a good reason to upgrade. But what else?
I am looking forward to improvements in NFS/SMB protocols and the Power Modes feature. I would like to reduce my costs because electricity is always getting more expensive. So to see an option for power efficiency being built in excites me.
Those of you who love ZFS, there are a lot of improvements for you. I do not run ZFS, but if you like that enterprise feel, it is a great option. They have made it official that you can operate Unraid without using an Unraid array and can solely utilize ZFS. There were some improvements to docker for ZFS users as well.
What to do before you upgrade
This one is dense and has a lot of my opinions in it. Other people have opinions on what to do and everyone is different. If my recommendations do not match your expectations or needs, that is ok.
Flash drive
Back it up. Unraid provides a utility for this and offers a free cloud backup for your flash drive.
You can also back it up locally yourself. Please do not store the backup of your flash drive on your Unraid system. For seemingly self evident reasons, if your drive dies, you will not have an easy time getting to your backup on your array.
Array health
If you are like me and you noticed one of your drives in the array is unhealthy, do NOT proceed. First, you need to correct the error. Even if you have two parity drives, you should still get your array into a clean and healthy state before you proceed with a major upgrade.
In my case, I have a warm spare Hard Disk Drive (HDD) waiting to be swapped in when another fails. All I had to do was stop the array, switch the bad drive with the spare in the GUI, and start the array back up.
Unraid will detect the new drive and begin rebuilding the data onto it. Once it completes, you are in a better position to start upgrading.
3-2-1
I am not counting down to my install, rather explaining a philosophy.
Many in the IT and data hoarding world have taken to the philosophy of a 3-2-1 backup strategy.
- 3 - Copies of your data
- 2 - Different media types
- 1 - Offsite
Yes, I actually have multiple copies of all of my data. “But isn’t the array already backed up?”
This is a common misconception but a backup is a separate copy of data that can be restored. Often times a historical approach allows you to jump back to multiple versions of a file. For example, if you have a corrupted document you would be able to restre a backup from before it was corrupted. With data redundancy, what Unraid gives us with the array, your data is stored multiple times but it is identical. This means if you corrupted the document once, it will be corrupt in the redundancy as well.
I use duplicati, but there are a few tools out there to do this and I am sure they all work well. In duplicati I have a backup set for every night to a USB external hard drive. Fortunately for me, I do not need to back up my entire media library because I have all the discs lying around the house somewhere. So the majority of data on my array, nearly 8TB, does not need backing up and I can rely on a small external drive to backup the remaining 100GB or so.
I also have a second backup set in duplicati that publishes and encrypted backup to Backblaze B2 every week. This is my offsite backup for all of my critical data. I end up paying in the neighborhood of $8 a year for my ~100GB of data to be stored on there. It is a good price to pay for knowing my pictures and documents are all copied in the event my basement floods or something.
The upgrade
With that all taken care of, the upgrade is actually relatively simple. You can select the hamburger menu in the top right of your Unraid dashboard and select “check for updates” or “upgrade unraid”.
While the update started downloading, I took that time to shutdown my docker containers and VMs if I had any. This is a peace of mind thing for me. A lot of people will reboot Unraid after the update and think nothing of the docker containers and VMs running. Personally I just like shutting things down myself ahead of time.
I also stopped the array. This was completely unnecessary because Unraid will do that safely if you reboot from the UI after the update is complete. Again, it was a personal preference to spin it down while I was waiting.
After the upgrade, some plugins will attempt to update. Some will succeed and some will not. After they are done, you can reboot. I would immediately go to plugins and update the remaining ones.
That is it. Pretty simple and painless in my experience. Of course, I felt completely secure in the event the upgrade failed because I had a backup of my flash drive and all of my critical data to restore.