I like Snapraid, but there are a few downsides worth mentioning * Rebuilds are semi-offline, as you said. Almost every other solution, even Unraid, will immedi

I like Snapraid, but there are a few downsides worth mentioning * Rebuilds are semi-offline, as you said. Almost every other solution, even Unraid, will immediately emulate the data from a failed drive. On Snapraid you have to wait for each file to be restored, and depending on your union setup this may mean you have directories with half the files missing * Whenever you modify or delete a file between syncs, your parity is now out of sync. This means some other files may fail to restore if you have a failure now. However using more than single parity will make this far less likely to happen. Another way to fix this completely the "snapraid-btrfs" tool, which runs Snapraid on snapshots of independent btrfs disks (somewhat like Synology?), meaning the old data is still available * It saves almost no file metadata, not even owner and mode. Restored files just use the umask of the user running the restore command. A minor one, but surprisingly annoying However one big advantage over Unraid it has is how transactional and rigorous it is. A power failure can cause Unraid parity to desync, with no clear way to know which disk is right. Snapraid OTOH is designed to survive interruptions gracefully, and checksums all files so should never accidentally restore corrupt data. And can detect silent drive failure ("bitrot") as a bonus And for a typical home NAS storing movies and family photos (mostly append-only), those downsides are probably no big deal anyway