Unraid 8 Announced
New Distro, Docker Compose, Integrated Backups, and much more is coming to an Unraid server near you.
Last time, you met our CEO, Tiffany. This time, you meet the person who started it all 20 years ago: Unraid's creator, Tom, and our product director, Eli, talk about where Unraid is going next. If you missed it, start with Part 1 with CEO Tiffany first.
How We Got Here
Unraid started in 2005 with a pile of random white-label drives. Tom was between jobs, came from an enterprise storage background, and was digitizing his DVD collection onto cheap white-label drives that kept dying. Losing one meant losing a lot of time. He wanted redundancy without rebuilding everything into a traditional RAID, so he took the Linux MD driver, reworked it, and created the parity-protected Unraid array we all know today.
From there, the community carried it. Unraid version five added PHP and an official plugin system, and a community developer named Ronald built the Dynamix web GUI Unraid still uses. RIP Ronald, you are missed.
Unraid V6 brought 64-bit, virtual machines, Docker, and Community Apps, built by a community member everyone knows as Squid, who still curates the app feed today.
Unraid V7 added full ZFS support and ZFS mirrored boot, so you can move your boot off USB entirely and drop that flash drive in a junk drawer. Every step opened the door wider for the people building alongside us.
Which brings us to Unraid 8.
Why Unraid 8 Moves to Fedora
One of the biggest changes coming is under the hood: Unraid 8 is moving to a Fedora base, built on Universal Blue's uCore. The reason is simple: we want to get you security updates faster, and give you more control over your own machine.
Security work has sped up across the entire Linux world; vulnerabilities are found faster than ever, in packages and in the kernel itself. A Fedora base lets patches reach you more quickly, and on your own terms.
"Unraid has always been a so-called immutable OS— however you modify your server, if you go in there, you type the wrong command, you delete all the files from your root, you still could just reboot and you're back to the virgin release… and that's a big reason why we've chosen Fedora [uCore]."
— Tom Mortensen, creator of Unraid
Tom built that immutable design in Slackware years before "immutable Linux" was a mainstream idea. Fedora and Universal Blue let us keep it while gaining a much larger, standardized base, better hardware support out of the box, and the ability to lean on the wider Fedora community when niche issues come up. It also lets us cleanly separate the base OS from the Unraid software above it, offer the option to run the latest kernel for brand-new hardware while everyone else stays on a stable long-term kernel, and ship faster, security-only patches.
What's Coming in Unraid 8
A few of the headline additions:
- Faster, self-service security updates: Thanks to the Fedora base and a cleaner distro/OS separation.
- A built-in backup solution: Back up to the cloud, an S3 bucket, or another Unraid server, with snapshots and full restores built right into the product.
- Native Docker Compose: Integrated into the Community Apps templating system so Compose templates live right alongside your existing apps. No jumping between a Compose view and a Docker view. Inspired by the excellent Compose work our community developers have already built.
- A plugin permission system: Before you install a plugin you can see exactly what it's allowed to touch — and decide whether you're comfortable with it. Alongside it, a proper plugin developer SDK to make building for Unraid easier.
- A more cohesive interface: Across the whole platform: the OS, your account, purchasing, key management, and the new ca.unraid.net Community Apps site. Learn one part of Unraid, and the rest feels familiar. Save an app from your phone, then install it from your server.
- Better hardware support out of the box: So more of the gear you already own just works with Unraid.
And there's more to come. Underneath all of it is one goal: make it genuinely easy for anyone to run their own server, get their data out of the cloud, and own their storage, whether they build a machine from scratch or buy a prebuilt system that ships with Unraid.
Nothing Taken Away
Making Unraid easier for newcomers doesn't mean taking anything away from technical users. We're keeping every advanced capability — bridging NICs, VLANs, the networking features power users love — and actually making them easier to find when you need them. Lower the floor, raise the ceiling. Advanced doesn't have to mean difficult.
And one rule hasn't changed in 20 years and never will: don't lose your data. Everything we build gets measured against that first.
Join the Unraid 8 Beta Test Group
We'll be reaching out to community developers to get them ready for the new system, followed by a closed beta, then an open beta on the normal release channels, and release candidates from there. We're not rushing this one, it'll ship when it's ready, but you can get in line now!
In the meantime, browse and save apps at ca.unraid.net, and send feature requests and bug reports straight to our team at product.unraid.net.
Here's to the Next 20
Tom put it best when Ed asked what 2005-Tom would have made of all this: it started as beer money, and now it's around 30 people building the product together, with the community adding ideas at every step. Twenty years is a rare run for any software — rarer still to stay independent the whole way.
Same idea that started it all: your hardware, your data, your choice.
Cheers to the next 20.
Try before you buy
Not sure if Unraid is right for you? Take Unraid for a test drive for 30 days—no credit card required.
