One of the most powerful features of unRAID 6 comes in the form of application support through what we call unRAID Extensions.
Think of extensions in the same way you would a file extension in any popular program, for instance, Adobe Photoshop: there are BMPs, JPEGs, PNGs, TIFFs, etc. Each of those are just different ways to store and manage the content inside them. The same holds true for Extensions in unRAID in the form of Plugins, Containers, and Virtual Machines. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, but in the end, they serve a common purpose in allowing the user to run an application on their unRAID server.
Just like on a smartphone, tablet, Mac, or PC, running applications on your NAS will give you more value out of your investment in hardware. The applications available to you on unRAID are also designed to save time, money, or otherwise improve your quality of life. Today we will be covering a few examples of applications available to use in unRAID 6.
Thanks to peter_sm, a loyal community member, unRAID features a fully-functional OpenVPN client and server capability that is easy to install on any unRAID system. VPN (virtual private networks) are a way to create secure private tunnels between two different systems. A common use for VPNs in the business world is to allow remote users to connect securely to their office while at home or abroad. For unRAID users, OpenVPN enables the same benefits but more likely for use in a peer-to-peer setting. A powerful example would be to create a VPN tunnel between a few trusted peers for an extra layer of security and protection while backing up important data using Crashplan or another backup solution on unRAID. Back-up your most important data (family videos/pictures, personal documents, etc.) and at the same time, avoid network performance throttling by most Internet service providers.
There is an ever-growing concern with trust for “the cloud.” Recent security breaches, NSA spying, and other tomfoolery, have made users less trustworthy of “the cloud” and looking for ways to better protect themselves, while still continuing to use their technology as they please. Thanks to gfjardim from our community, users now have a way to get all the benefits of a Dropbox-like service but hosted on hardware they own and operate inside of a Docker container. Best of all: its completely free. Download and run it today.
Using Plex on unRAID, users can leverage their underutilized hardware resources (CPU/Memory) to stream content over their network to a variety of different devices. Plex players are available for HTML5 (any web browser), iOS, Android, and even devices like Google Chromecast and Amazon Fire TV. In addition, Plex can transcode content on the fly to support a variety of network connections and even can stream said content to remote devices over the Internet (Plex Pass subscription required). In addition, it supports a variety of different types of content: TV Shows, Movies, Home Videos, Pictures, and Music. Quite simply, Plex is one of the most elegant solutions we’ve found at Lime Technology for managing all of your personal digital media.
One of the biggest features Plex Pass subscribers will gain is the ability to take their content “to-go” and not have to suffer both the expense and inconsistent experience of mobile data. By “syncing” content in Plex to your mobile devices, you can save money and bandwidth. Examples:
- Watching Media on an Airplane:
- Pay for wifi on plane (if available): $10 – 15 per flight (may not be able to stream video)
- Watch your movies you synced to your devices: Plex Pass Subscription ($3.99 per month, unlimited usage)
- Watching Media Using Mobile Data vs. Local Data:
- Watch 45 minutes of 720p Netflix video and consume 500MB of data usage
- Watch unlimited content you synced to your mobile device: 0MB data plan usage.
As someone who has a 2 year old daughter, it’s great to be able to provide entertainment for her while out to dinner without having to limit our options to Wifi capable restaurants or worry about data plan consumption while we’re on the go with her. Thanks to another community member, needo, you can run Plex on unRAID today as a Docker container.
The topic of backups constantly comes up in our community forums. While unRAID protects your data by using a parity, this protection is only designed to protect against data loss caused by a drive failure, and is not considered a “backup”. Imagine your home suffered a natural disaster such as a fire or flood? What about a user just deleting a file they didn’t mean to and they want it back? Or what if you drop your server/storage devices during a physical move to a new location? Backups are designed to allow users to recover data in scenarios like these, where a parity drive cannot.
Crashplan by Code42 is a solution that can be configured on your unRAID server and then managed from another Mac\Windows-based PC or Laptop on your network. From there, you can configure your unRAID server to backup some or all of your data. Crashplan also gives you the flexibility to choose where you wish your backup data to be stored: on a secondary machine you own, on a trusted friends machine, or in the Crashplan cloud service.
Lastly, you may wish to use Crashplan to not only backup your unRAID system itself, but also to backup your multiple personal devices as well. A common way users have set this up is to enable their various devices (laptops, PCs, mobile devices) to backup to their unRAID server locally, and then replicate that backup along with other data to an offsite location for the ultimate protection.
We highly recommend you check out the Crashplan Docker container that is available today on unRAID 6 to start backing up your data. Another thanks to gfjardim for putting this together as well.
