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Problem backing up (via Allway Sync) to USB drives


keinreis

Question

I recently had to migrate data from 5 X 4TB HDD's that were in an old WHS 2011 setup when my eSATA enclosure's power supply died.  I was basically just using WHS 2011 as a file server, so I decided just to move on from WHS 2011 and build a Win10-based PC in a case with a lot of 3.5" drive bays instead.  Before I built the new PC, I backed up all the data on the 5 X 4TB HDD's to external USB drives.  I wasn't using DrivePool on WHS 2011.

 

Upon completing the build of the new PC, I decided to give DrivePool a try.  I purchased the 2.0 version, and installed it.  I then installed three brand-new 4TB drives, and created a new pool - adding those three drives to the pool.  I copied over as much data to those three drives from the external USB drives to the three HDD in the pool as would fit.  I still had two drives from the old WHS setup, which were less than a year old, and checked out healthy  -so I decided to re-use them at least temporarily.  Having read that drives with existing data could be added to a pool, I just installed those old 4TB drives and added them to the pool.  I moved the data out of the old WHS 2011 ServerFolders into new folders, and added those folders to the pool.  I ended up with exactly what I set out to have - five 4TB drives, and their data, in a pool.

 

I know DrivePool offers file duplication, but I just don't have enough free space on my drives to duplicate everything that I would need to.  I also prefer to have an offline backup, so I set up Allway Sync to sync all the data in my pool back to the same external USB drives that I had previously used to back up that data in the first place. I have added no new data to the drives in the pool yet.  Even the folder structure is identical between what's in the pool, and what's on the external USB drives.  

 

I am now attempting to set up a one-way sync from the pooled drives back to the external USB drives in Allway Sync.  When Allway Sync "analyzes" the data between the pooled drives and the external USB drives, it doesn't recognize that any of the existing files are already on the USB drives.  It wants to copy everything over again - which shouldn't be necessary.

 

I'm new to the pooled drive thing, so maybe I'm missing some elementary understanding of how it works.  Any idea what I need to do to set up the sync properly so I don't have to copy all the files over again?

 

Thanks!

 

   

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Hi

 

couple of things to check

 

did you reset the archive bit for the files? as you copied them onto new drives windows will mark them for backup

how does Allway sync determine if files match? - if by file date etc those have changed

 

you could also try syncbackpro or the free version as you might have more control over what gets backed up

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Appreciate the reply. 

 

Though they don't refer to it as USN Journalling, I think this is the setting you were talking about:.

 

Propagate modifications
Files and folders modified on the source side are overwritten on the target side during synchronization. 

 

I now have that one un-checked, and it isn't trying to create all new files unnecessarily.

 

DrivePool is working great.  Glad I decided to give it a try.

 

Thanks,.  

.  

- Rob

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Yeah, that's probably exactly it. 

 

The USN Journal is specifically to track changes to the filesystem.  It's essentially a "change log" for the file system.  And that setting sounds like it is ABSOLUTELY using the USN journal to find those changes. 

 

Unfortunately, the USN Journal is a low level NTFS feature, and not easy to emulate.  It's something that we do want to look into and see if we can properly emulate it. but it will be a very complex peice of code to do so. 

 

You can read about the USN Journal here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USN_Journal

 

 

And I'm glad to hear that unchecking the option has fixed the issue.

And we're definitely glad you decided to try it as well!

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