Hey guys - so I have an ubuntu server setup here in my house with just two drives in it, a 3tb and a 4tb. Speeds are adequate, not a huge load maybe 4 people on a plex server max at once so no biggie. I would LIKE to make file management easier and am considering diving into mergerfs but have never used it. Many will say to use ZFS and while that sounds great I have reasons that I don’t want to. The disks are NTFS currently and at the moment I don’t have enough other disks to backup the data to do a ZFS setup from scratch of LVM configuration and so either of those options means losing all data which I don’t want to do. I am not concerned about redundancy (atm anyways). So my question is can I implement mergerfs to bring the two disks into a single fileshare without losing my data (in other words without reformatting)? Can I use NTFS beneath the mergerfs volume? I have an SSD for the OS as well with lots of extra space that I would LOVE to use for a cache but havent touched that yet, is THAT possible with mergerfs somehow?
Speed is fine, redundancy is a problem I will solve when I have the cash, but convenience and if possible caching are things that I would really like to handle now.
Any comments other than ‘use ZFS’ that you have? What is a good strategy so that I CAN put this together in one shareable volume on plex and samba without reformatting i.e. losing all of my data and IS there a way that I can add redundancy at a later date by say adding two more 4tb drives for instance?
To my knowledge with mergerfs you can add disks of any size to the volume and it will simply increase the size of that share so it is available to the user, is that correct?
What caveats/hazards might there be?
Sorry for all of the questions but everything that I have read on this has skirted these specific questions. Most of my data is music and movies/tv shows but still I would rather NOT lose them and have to find them again if at all possible…
Lastly if there is something that I am missing here please let me know. Basically I am looking for a FS similar to synologys where any size disk can be added at any time (and if possible redundancy exists as well) but I had thought that was based on btrfs…?
Thx in advance
I’m interested in this too, … from reading of the manpage, it looks like NTFS would work.
you can probably try this out, see if it works/passes: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/fstest , obviously NTFS was not built for linux and mergerfs is not that widely used so it might have bugs or missing features or features that are implemented wrong or do things you might not expect… but that’s true for most software and probably not what you had in mind.
If you can accept the risk to loose the contents of the drives if pear shaped (I mean obviously mergerfs works for someone out there, so why not you), … why not try it out.
I’d backup the important stuff, maybe I’d make some kind of inventory of all the other stuff and back that up too.
yea i was thinking some of the same things as you and sort of wondering, why is it NOT used more often? it seems like it would be a quick and easy way to store a lot of (relatively unimportant) information on the cheap. perhaps there just arent many use cases where redundancy is NOT a priority???
as for the info that i have honestly my personal files such as photos are backed up and i HAVE had a HD crash which caused me to want to build this in the first place but i am stuck in that struggle where i need redundancy AND more space, and really have the $$ for neither (i live in turkey at the moment and the currency here just tanked)…that said i strongly appreciate your input, tho before i dive in i kind of want to see if anyone else hops on here and concurs with you (us, really)…please dont be offended or anything…and yea as for software sometimes doing wacjy shit, i totally get you i accept that there is risk of course but is it an irresponsible amount, i think THAT is the question?
thanks again man really, big help!
I have been running it for a while now, a year or two I think.
I’m in a similar situation: the disk I saved my movies etc on is still in ntfs and pretty full, while I have some spare space on other disks. I could use mount points, but this still requires a bunch of planning before and fiddling after.
Mergersfs just gives you one pool, the fuse driver decides where to put it - dependent on your settings.
I’ve pooled a spare partition (250GB ext4) and two disks (4TB ext4 & 4TB ntfs) and just use that as my generic storage point. The upside is that losing a drive will not destroy the whole pooled space, just that one disk will be gone. You can still access the data using the individual drive mount.
I do have a ZFS mirror with my (borg) backup files, as well as a remote copy for important stuff.
Make sure you use a recent version as the author does enhance stuff frequently. It may take some tweaking in the options to get it working right on filemoves etc.
I use AUFS as it’s faster than the other ones I’ve tried, although I don’t think I’ve tried mergerfs, but AUFS doesn’t use FUSE so I assume it’s faster anyway.
If you want to add redundancy to a set of disks without changing the file system have a look at snapraid. I’ve been using it for years and it’s saved me a couple of times.
AUFS is no longer maintained nor included in recent kernels. AUFS is likely faster than FUSE based solutions but most of the time drives or network are the bottleneck.
https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs has an extensive amount of information including comparisons to other, related solutions. Best to read over that.
I’m assuming that username is not a coincidence…
UPDATE - I took the plunge and installed and configured it. It took longer to find the .deb file than it did to install and configure (as it took probably less than a minute total). I now have a single samba share and a single repository for all of my files, at least viewable to the use that is. Its great and soooo easy.
You CAN use this with RAID or LVM or ZFS and with basically any FS so my disks are ntfs for instance so this is pretty kickass and strongly recomended if youre in the position i was in