Unraid Community Rockstars trurl and JonathanM
One of the main reasons why the Unraid community is so great is due to our many Community Rockstars who go above and beyond to help others out. 🤘
In this blog series, we want to put a spotlight on key community members to get to know them a little better and recognize them for all that they've done for the Unraid community over the years.
For this inaugural blog, we'll begin with two outstanding forum Moderators who have helped out countless new Unraid users over the years.
- JonathanM joined the Unraid forum in 2008.
- Posts: 13,000+
- Days Won (most liked content): 57
How did you discover Unraid originally?
Too many years ago. I can't remember where I discovered it, but my motivation was finding a better solution after losing an entire hardware controller-based RAID5 pool after 1 drive failed completely and another was intermittent, causing the rebuild to be very corrupt.
I still have the remnants of that recovery on one of my Unraid servers, maybe one of these days either the data will be important enough for me to dig through, or I'll stop caring about even trying and delete it to recover the space. Data hoarding FTW!
What do you like most about being a part of this community?
A tech family that tries to stay friendly to everyone, regardless of their experience level. Too many tech communities are extremely unfriendly to newbies, even (especially?) when they have good questions that are common unspoken or undocumented knowledge to the existing community. You don't have to have a CS doctorate to participate here.
What is your most liked feature of Unraid?
Stability. Years of experience with Unraid has shown me I can trust my data to it as long as I do my part and feed it quality hardware and keep on top of failing drive notifications.
What feature would you most like to see added to Unraid?
Server to server backup with an easy to configure GUI, utilizing VPN for site to site with bandwidth limiting if needed. Have the source and destination server on two sides like a classical 2-panel file explorer, showing share sizes and free space. Allow either open file synchronization, so you could for example designate a "Family Pictures" share to be replicated on both servers, or an encrypted archive where the destination server only sees the source server's name or other ID. You could mix and match, where certain shares are open and synched one or two ways, others are version encrypted backups.
Stop reading here if you are only interested in features attainable currently.
Expanding on this, I would like to see the ability to designate a certain amount of space as community backup, and allow other unknown to me Unraid servers to send encrypted backup to a specific area of my server, in exchange for a similar but smaller amount of space I could use for cloud backups of my files. If I wanted to back up 1TB of data, I could designate 2TB of space for community backup, and be assured that there would be at least 2 copies of my data out there somewhere. If I took my community space offline for an extended period of time (weeks?), my backups would be deleted from whoever had them and the space reclaimed, and the data I was holding replicated to a different server from the surviving set. Obviously, the logistics of this are enormous. It's a pie in the sky dream right now.
Do you have a donation link you’d like to share?
- trurl joined the Unraid forum in 2011.
- Posts: 34,000+
- Days Won (most liked content): 113
- Lives in North Carolina, USA
How did you discover Unraid originally?
I had outgrown my HP MediaVault and decided to build my own NAS. Looked at a few possibilities for OS and chose Unraid because of the very active, friendly, helpful forum.
What do you like most about being a part of this community?
I've learned a lot here and I always like to "pay it forward”.
What is your most liked feature of Unraid?
I'll pick one nobody else mentioned yet, Notifications. I just love getting emails from my servers.
What feature would you most like to see added to Unraid?
I've adapted rsync scripts from the forum for my backups but a built-in GUI would be nice, with a destination to Unassigned Device or another server with job scheduling.
Do you have a donation link you’d like to share?
Has trurl or JonathanM helped you out?
Say thanks in the forums!