Up for consideration is a new article that demonstrates how to use snapraid-btrfs and snapraid-btrfs-runner for Perfect Media Server deployment. In this guide, bulk data drives are formatted as single-disk BTRFS filesystems, with /data subvolumes on each drive. Drives are pooled together with MergerFS and parity protection is provided using snapraid-btrfs as a wrapper for SnapRAID. snapraid-btrfs uses Snapper to take BTRFS snapshots of each data drive prior to syncing SnapRAID parity. It keeps these snapshots such that parity is always valid for the data it's protecting.
The benefits of snapraid-btrfs are well-articulated at the project repo. Briefly, the key benefit is that the user doesn't need to worry about stopping services or preventing files from being modified prior to running snapraid-btrfs sync. Furthermore, any files deleted from the live filesystems will not impact parity protection for the rest of the array as those deleted files would still be present in the latest snapshot, allowing snapraid-btrfs fix operations to completely recover data in the event of a lost drive.
I use this exact setup with a 16-drive 156TB pool and run snapraid-btrfs-runner every night.
I'm not sure which category the article belongs in, whether Tools, System administration, or perhaps a new Storage category. I've submitted it under Tools at this time.
Up for consideration is a new article that demonstrates how to use snapraid-btrfs and snapraid-btrfs-runner for Perfect Media Server deployment. In this guide, bulk data drives are formatted as single-disk BTRFS filesystems, with
/datasubvolumes on each drive. Drives are pooled together with MergerFS and parity protection is provided using snapraid-btrfs as a wrapper for SnapRAID. snapraid-btrfs uses Snapper to take BTRFS snapshots of each data drive prior to syncing SnapRAID parity. It keeps these snapshots such that parity is always valid for the data it's protecting.The benefits of snapraid-btrfs are well-articulated at the project repo. Briefly, the key benefit is that the user doesn't need to worry about stopping services or preventing files from being modified prior to running
snapraid-btrfs sync. Furthermore, any files deleted from the live filesystems will not impact parity protection for the rest of the array as those deleted files would still be present in the latest snapshot, allowingsnapraid-btrfs fixoperations to completely recover data in the event of a lost drive.I use this exact setup with a 16-drive 156TB pool and run snapraid-btrfs-runner every night.
I'm not sure which category the article belongs in, whether Tools, System administration, or perhaps a new Storage category. I've submitted it under Tools at this time.
Looking forward to seeing feedback!