Unraid 8 Explained: New Distro, Docker Compose, Backups and more | Uncast (Part 2 of 2)

So next thing that happened is we decided, okay, let's move to version 7.

And Now what we're doing with version 7 is we're finding that there are more business type applications, more business opportunities, and advanced home users.

And one of the big things that's always been a two-edged sword is the USB boot and USB licensing.

It has always been a two-edged sword.

On the one side, it's super easy.

It's super easy to prepare the flash.

You boot from it.

All the config data is there.

It's just updates are easy.

There's a lot of advantages.

But the downside is USB flash is flaky and tends to fail, especially lately.

It seems like the quality in general of flash has just gone down.

And people want redundancy.

If your flash fails, you can't boot.

Okay, so we embarked on the main thing in Unraised 7 was two things.

Well, one was ZFS.

We needed to add ZFS support because community wanted ZFS support.

And again, we wanted to open the door for developers to come in and just continue developing uh doing things that they want to do with the platform and so we integrated zfs but that also let us integrate zfs uh mirrored boot we call that internal boot right now in version 7 and what that does is you still initially configure your server you can boot your server of a flash but now we have a way of transferring the boot to a mirrored zfs pool And on top of that, too, what we wanted the user to be able to do is once that's accomplished, you know, take that flash out and throw it back in your junk drawer.

That's what we wanted.

So in order to do that, we implemented TPM licensing as well.

So it's totally off the USB at this point.

So that was the main thrust of version 7.

Of course, all along this road, there's been a lot of refinements in the management interface, the web viewing.

in the distro etc that's you know i've glossed over all that but but but that's sort of the rough road map that brings us to where we are today with version seven um we're still working of course producing version seven releases with refinements but coming up on the future is unrate version eight And we want to talk a little bit about that.