Recommended Windows config without union?

I have seen a few guides on setup, which mostly use union. That's not ideal for me, as I use more storage on my GDrive than I have on my server. So here's the settings that I am currently using:

[GDrive]
type = drive
client_id = xxx
client_secret = xxx
scope = drive
token = xxx

[GCache]
type = cache
remote = GDrive:Media
plex_url = http://192.168.0.21:32400/
plex_username = xxx
plex_password = xxx
chunk_size = 5M
info_age = 1h
chunk_total_size = 32G

[Media_vfs]
type = crypt
remote = GCache:
filename_encryption = standard
directory_name_encryption = true
password = xxx
password2 = xxx

And I set up nssm with the following command:
mount --allow-other --buffer-size 1G --dir-cache-time 48h --drive-chunk-size 64M --vfs-read-chunk-size 32M --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 2G --cache-chunk-path "C:\RClone\cache-chunk-path" --cache-dir "C:\RClone\cache-dir" Media_vfs: N: --config "C:\Users\Inrego\.config\rclone\rclone.conf" --vfs-cache-mode writes

Problem is, I'm having rather big problems with Sonarr and Radarr moving downloaded items to the cloud. Many transfers show up as failed, even though they successfully transfered (fine isn't found on remote immediately after transfer finishes).
But more concerning is that whole file explorer frequently freezes up. That means neither Plex, Sonarr or Radarr can read any file from the remote. I am not able to open a file explorer for any purpose. This seems to persist through restart of rclone, Plex, Sonarr and Radarr.
Looking at performance metrics in Task Manager, neither of my disks are being used, and nothing is being transferred on ethernet.

Last few days, Plex has been almost unusable due to these issues.

I hope anyone can be of assistance. Am I setting flags that shouldn't be set on my mount command? Am I missing something?

Right now, Explorer is just frozen. Even restart of the machine doesn't fix it. I'm gonna enable logging on rclone to see what's up. As soon as I stop rclone, explorer works again.

EDIT: Log from startup to explorer freeze: https://drive.google.com/open?id=15abtk_Ql6t1p4TOdg347QxI78uqra0aP
Note how many lines are going into the log file until line 14630, then only a few lines per minute. I do also see some post errors here, but:

  1. should post errors freeze explorer.exe on Windows? Makes it more or less impossible to use the computer in any way.
  2. Do you know why it's getting that error? Pretty sure I didn't reach my daily limit.

you could have unionfs setup and have sonarr/radarr point to it and then have a script run every 5min or more that rclone the local to gdrive. This way you can still have sonarr/radarr see all your file (for updating qualities) and not tax your mount.

Aha - I feel so dumb now. I just now read up on what union does, and it's different than what I expected. That's quite useful, thanks.

But - Radarr/Sonarr will not be able to delete old versions in case of an upgrade?

Ah, but I guess that's why animosity uses unionFS instead of a union remote? Because union remote in rclone is read-only for all except one source, where unionFS isn't?

EDIT: referring to https://github.com/animosity22/homescripts

Seems like there's no unionFS for Windows :confused:
I'll keep looking for solutions along these lines.

This seems the most promising, although no work seems to have been done on it yet.

I use mergerfs not unionfs, but no Windows that either unfortunately.

I'm thinking to reinstall my server soon, with Debian instead of Windows. Can you explain, what's the advantage of mergerfs over unionfs?

You'll find Ubuntu to be a bit more up to date than Debian as a whole so imo, it's a better option for less messing around with packages.

I use mergerfs over unionsfs as it gives me the advantage of a hard link underneath the covers.

That means when a torrent finishes, it makes a link to the file rather than another copy as I keep everything on my mergerfs setup. So you can make many hard links for a file and it only occupies 1 copy of the file. The caveat is that is has to be on the same physical disk under neath.

Thanks for the pointers. I think I'll spin up a VM soon to get everything set up before I install it as primary OS. Don't want too much down-time ^^

It's a bit daunting at first but stick with it as it's worth it in the end. I made the switch a "few" years back and couldn't imagine looking back as I haven't touched a Windows machine for home or work for ~10 years :slight_smile:

I'm no stranger to Linux. But as I'm primarily a C# developer, Windows machine just made more sense for me for a long time. However, now with .NET Core that's no longer an issue.
Actually my whole setup was on Debian some years ago, I migrated it to Windows because that's where I'm more familiar, plus I wanted to host some .NET sites.
But I think I'm gonna stick with Linux on my server this time, as I don't see any reasons for going back to Windows for that machine (my personal machines will still be Windows for the foreseeable future)

This seems pretty neat for gracefully migrating. Once everything is set up on Ubuntu in my VM, I can just move it to physical hardware.

@Inrego a physical installation is never the ideal approach as physical installations are substantially less flexible than a VM on a hypervisor.

If you have a Type 1 Hypervisor setup and running (ESXi VMware, XCP-ng, KVM etc) use that and put your VM on that, configured for how you'd treat any production server.

Yeah, but my "server" is just a home server with consumer hardware, standing in my living room.
I'm aware of the flexibility of virtual machines, but I'd rather have just 1 OS, rather than both host and guest OS sharing resources.

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