snapraid

MergerFS

sudo apt install fuse mergerfs

Create a mountpoint for all the disks.

mkdir /mnt/disk{1,2,3} # this command will create 3 directory
mkdir /mnt/pool /mnt/parity

• edit the disks in /etc/fstab
• the disks must have a partition created eg./dev/sda1 for the mount

Add mergerfs into /etc/fstab

/mnt/disk* /mnt/storage fuse.mergerfs defaults,cache.files=off,allow_other,category.create=mfs,minfreespace=250G,fsname=mergerfs 0 0

Relative path: path in mergerfs pool relative to the path of individual drive and pool
Path preservation: policies that only consider branches (path of individual disks) where the relative path being accessed already exists

• eg. with 3 disks, /mnt/{a,b,c}, if a folder movies exists in only a,b not not c, a path preservation policy will only consider a,b when a request to create a file /mnt/pool/movies/file.mkv and the file would not be created in c
• eg. for epmfs, the previous example would choose a,b and see which drive has most free space and only put files on these drives, even if c has more free space; while mfs ignore existing path and would create movies/file.mkv on c if that has the most free space

MergerFS Options

• /mnt/disk* the disks to be added into mergerfs, assuming the disks are disk1,2,3,4,5
• /mnt/pool where the pooled disks are
• fuse.mergerfs use mergerfs for this mount
• defaults
  • action=epall actions such as rename, change metadata (chmod/own) will apply to all found
  • create=epmfs files will be created on disks with most free space and preserve path
  • search=ff search will act on the first found
• category.create the policy
• cache.file=off disable page cache in mergerfs, other options include partial, which could be useful for sqlite apps and rtorrent
• allow_other is explicitly needed when some of the drives that needs to be pooled are NTFS
• fsname=mergerfs shows a friendly name in df -h command

SnapRAID

Use Docker to build SnapRAID
https://github.com/ironicbadger/docker-snapraid

• run the build.sh and install the package with sudo dpkg -i *.deb

SnapRAID is configured via /etc/snapraid.conf

parity /mnt/parity/snapraid.parity # location of the parity
content /srv/snapraid/snapraid.content # content file
disk d1 /mnt/data # data disk, d1 is the disk name used in snapraid

• content file contains details of all the files in the array

Example configuration file with exclusions
https://gist.github.com/IronicBadger/ce960d96015b28a03373

snapraid status will get the status of array, whether there are corruptions

Diff

snapraid diff list all the files that are modified from the last sync, it is recommended to run before syncing to check for deleted files

• if a sync is required, it will require 2 as exit code

Sync

snapraid sync will sync the data and create parity (also compute hashes)

• it’s best to use it in a screen/tmux session
• if the SnapRAID sync is abruptly stopped, the next session will start where it’s left off
• -E will force empty, and sync will proceed even if a data disk is empty

Scrub

snapraid scrub check the data and parity for errors, it is only read intensive

snapraid -p 5 -o 20 scrub

• -p set the % of array to scrub
• -p bad will only scrub the bad parts of the array
• -o older than, any data older than x days will be scrubbed

Fix

snapraid fix restore or undeleted files from accident or disk failure

snapraid fix -f FILE or DIR/ or -m

• for directory add / to the end
• -m option will fix every deleted files
• -d will act on entire disk (eg. for recovering), the disk name eg. d1 is given in the configuration file, it will also fix parity
• -e will fix errors in the scrub command

Fixing delete files on Radarr behaving and upgrade

snapraid fix -f /Movies/Name/file.srt

• must provide it as absolute path /Movies but without disk number d1
• the file path and name can be found by snapraid diff | grep

Check

snapraid check verify all files and parity data

• -a is audit only, only the file data is checked and parity data is ignored

Disaster Recovery

Edit the configuration so that is points to the new disks

data d2 /mnt/new_location

snapraid -d d2 -l fix.log fix

• files that cannot be recovered will have .unrecoverable file extension

snapraid -d d2 -a check

• this will only check the data disk that is specified

Lastly run a snapraid sync.

Automating SnapRAID

https://github.com/Chronial/snapraid-runner
https://github.com/fightforlife/snapraid-runner with apprise support

• which snapraid to get the binary file of snapraid, which might be needed for configure the runner
• the python script will run SnapRAID diff command, and only run sync if the deleted is below threshold, optionally can be used to periodically scrub the array

By default the cron scripts are located in ~/scripts

cd ~/scripts
git clone https://github.com/fightforlife/snapraid-runner
cd snapraid-runner
mv snapraid-runner.py runner.py
mv snapraid-runner.conf.example snapraid-runner.conf

Configuration

+++ executable = /usr/local/bin/snapraid
+++ config = /etc/snapraid.conf
+++ file = sr.log
+++ url = apprise://

• use which snapraid to find executable location, use the default location
• it will store as sr.log instead

Crontab (every 2 days) - require uv installed and initialized. To install uv

uv init
uv add apprise
uv sync

5 2 */2 * * SHELL=/bin/bash cd /home/karis/scripts/snapraid-runner && /home/karis/.local/bin/uv run runner.py