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Try the following in a command prompt run as administrator? dpcmd refresh-all-poolparts

Thanks!

I started getting the following error after making some changes (added an SSD and changed the external DAS enclosure. Not sure what it means or how to resolve it. Any assistance is much appreciated.

"For duplication, is it like raid 1 or does it work more like mirrored where it makes an exact copy of each file?" DrivePool's duplication is basically mirroring but file-based rather than block-based; if you set (or change) the duplication on a pool or folder to N copies then DrivePool will try to maintain N identical copies of the pool's or folder's files across the drives in the pool, one copy per drive. E.g. if you have a pool of five drives and you set pool duplication to x3, then DrivePool will keep one copy of each file on each of any three drives of the five drives in the pool. You have the option of real-time or nightly duplication (the latter will also run as a safeguard even if you've selected the former). "My only thing about not duplicating is I heard the scanner would move files off the dying drive to the other drives if it has space, is this true? Would it be good to go to that and the cloud as well to make sure nothing happens? Like get it to move automatically my data if a drive is dying or get notifications if they are. Will the move on their own the data on the bad drive, or would I need to initiate it?" StableBit DrivePool does have an option to evacuate drives if StableBit Scanner flags them as bad (e.g. via SMART warning); if it's enabled it happens automatically (unless it runs out of space, yes). Note that if a drive fails abruptly then it won't have time to evacuate the drive, which is where duplication is useful. DrivePool and Scanner can provide notifications about failed and failing drives respectively (including via email if configured). If a drive in a pool does fail, the pool will become read-only until the drive is manually replaced (or removed). In a business environment, good practice for backups (IMO) is usually considered to be at least three copies of your files (the working copy and two backups) in at least three locations (your work machine, your onsite backup machine and another backup that's secured somewhere else). YMMV.

Thanks, this is what I wanted then. I need to mix drives and slowly add more storage as needed. For duplication, is it like raid 1 or does it work more like mirrored where it makes an exact copy of each file? The likelihood of both going down at the same time is low but i understand what you're saying because if both go then i'm screwed lol. My only thing about not duplicating is I heard the scanner would move files off the dying drive to the other drives if it has space, is this true? Would it be good to go to that and the cloud as well to make sure nothing happens? Like get it to move automatically my data if a drive is dying or get notifications if they are. Will the move on their own the data on the bad drive, or would I need to initiate it? For bitrot, drive pool can't do much but the zfs copies should be taken care of and when copied over it should be the same, right?

Hi Darkness2k. As the game is in open beta I'd suggest reporting the crashing to its developers (assuming you haven't already); they can then test it against DrivePool directly. If that doesn't progress, you can also open a support ticket with StableBit.

Hi xelu01. DrivePool is great for pooling a bunch of mixed size drives; I wouldn't use windows storage spaces for that (not that I'm a fan of wss in general; have not had good experiences). As for duplication it's a matter of how comfortable/secure you feel. One thing to keep in mind with backups is that if you only have one backup, then if/when your primary or your backup is lost you don't have any backups until you get things going again. Truenas's raidz1 means your primary can survive one disk failure, but backups are also meant to cover for primary deletions (accidental or otherwise) so I'd be inclined to have duplication turned on, at least for anything I was truly worried about (you can also set duplication on/off for individual folders). YMMV. Regarding the backups themselves, if you're planning to back up your nas as one big file then do note that DrivePool can't create a file that's larger than the largest free space of its individual volumes (or in the case of duplication, the two largest free spaces) since unlike raidz1 the data is not striped (q.v. this thread on using raid vs pool vs both). E.g. if you had a pool with 20TB free in total but the largest free space of any given volume in it was 5TB then you couldn't copy a file larger than 5TB to the pool.

New to drive pool and wanted to get some help on if this is the right use case before I purchase it. I have a truenas machine at home with all my data in a raidz1. I want to have a second set of this data in case anything happens. I have a many mixed size drives to use and was going to use them with windows storage spaces but heard about drive pool in the past and thought I'll drop by to see if anyone can help me with this. I want to just use this as a backup of my truenas data but didn't want to have a second truenas machine. Can I do this with just having a pool of my drives without duplication, since it's a duplicate of my data? Or would you still recommend duplication? The only worry is if both machines go down, but if one does then i got a second copy of my data.

Good afternoon, I just wanted to report an issue I experienced on two different computers whereby Throne and Liberty - Open Beta (via Steam) would start, but then crash to the desktop often before the intro logo's had completed. I tried moving the folder to a single drive in the pool (rather than load balancing) - no improvement. I then moved the folder to a disk/partition not being used by the pool - which worked. Not sure what's so special about this game - happy to provide further information and troubleshooting.

In the file "C:\ProgramData\StableBit DrivePool\Service\Settings.json" use an "Override" value greater than -2 for "DrivePool_BackgroundTasksPriority". The maximum possible is 15 but I would both recommend against that and suggest incrementing gradually (e.g. start with 0 or 2) and checking if it causes any problems for other processes.

This is on a backup server. Balancing can take a long time, but much less time if I hit the >> increase priority button at the end of the rebalancing band at the bottom of the GUI. It there a place in settings or the JSON file to make it the default to increase priority?

Preventing: Do regular (monthly? YMMV) full reads of drives (so that their own firmware can find/refresh iffy blocks) if you don't already have something doing that for you (e.g. RAID scheduled scrubbing or StableBit Scanner or the like). Don't use SSDs as long-term offline storage, it might work but they're meant to be powered on at least semi-regularly to keep the data charge fresh (at least until someone invents a better SSD). Use ECC RAM (and a mainboard+cpu that actually supports it, which can be a pain). Don't overclock. Circumventing: Use some form of parity-based checking, e.g. RAID 5 disk array or a file system that does parity (e.g. zfs for linux) or utility software such as SnapRAID or MultiPar etc. Keep backups! TLDR: best (IMO) is use ECC RAM on a mainboard+cpu that supports it, use RAID5 arrays with a monthly scheduled scrub, have backups. Since I'm firmly not in the "money no object" category, however, I mostly just rely on duplication (3x for critical docs), backups, Scanner and MultiPar (I keep meaning to use SnapRAID...). "If I go Drivepool route, I need to pull everything out of RAIDS first?" No. DrivePool can add a hardware RAID array to the pool as if it was a single disk (because that's how arrays present themselves to the OS), so you don't need to pull everything out of an existing array if you're happy to just add the array to the pool.

How do you prevent bitrot, or what can you do to circumvent it? I used Drivepool for years and loved it, but I dont honestly know if I would have known if something went wrong unless I went to open my stuff and it was gone/inaccessible. If I go Drivepool route, I need to pull everything out of RAIDS first?

The big advantage of hardware RAID (2+) is parity-based duplication and healing (remember to use scheduled scrubbing!), and complete transparency to your file system, and RAID 5 in particular can give great performance (especially for reads). The big disadvantage of hardware RAID (2+) is that if more drives die than you've got parity for, you lose the entire array instead of just the failed drives. The big advantage of DrivePool is you don't have to care about keeping all your drives the same size and type, you can remove drives as you please without having to rebuild the whole bloody array from scratch, adding a drive doesn't require (background) parity recomputation, you can freely mix SSD and HDD and use the former as cache, you can even add non-local drives via CloudDrive. The big disadvantage of DrivePool is that if any bitrot happens it has no self-healing capability. Late edit/add: one other disadvantage of DrivePool is that it can't create a file larger than the free space of its largest drive (since it doesn't use striping), which is something to keep in mind if you plan to be working with extremely large files. So if money was no object and I had a big honking bay of drives, no particulars withstanding I'd build multiple small sets of RAID 5 (three to five disks to an array) and pool them with DrivePool (duplication x2) to get the best of both worlds while minimising the downsides of each. One drive dies? No problem, pool's still writable, thanks RAID 5! An array dies? No problem, pool's still readable, thanks DrivePool! File bitrot happens? No problem, file's healable, thanks RAID 5!

I was using DrivePool because I couldn't get a RAID on an old server. Now I have a fancy server with hot swappable bays and a raid controller. What is the best practice to use RAID with stablebit? Should I just ignore the RAID setup and just Drivepool and all drives not in a RAID? Do I put them in the RAID as...mirrors? Or if money is no object do I just make my hardware raids and ignore Stablebit?

That's ok to do, won't cause any harm.

Hi. I have drivepool all setup & its working just fine, But have 1 question... I would like to know if using some of the free space on 1 HDD outside of the pool is safe & ok to do? I have 4 drives in my pool. 2 8TB's, 10TB & 20TB. I use torrent & usenet clients from time to time, & these sometimes download loads of small files at a time, & I really don't want these smaller files being downloaded to multiple drives at once in case of file corruption. Right now I have both the torrent & usenet client set to download to 1 of the 8TB drives to a folder I made outside of the pool, So that all read & writes are done to the same drive & not scattered all over multiple drives. Is this ok to do? I'm trying to avoid file corruption & pinging all drives at once using torrent & usenet clients, But I also don't want to cause any issue with my pool either 😂 Thanks.

I also got a little brave/creative/foolish and had the thought that maybe I could kick off the duplication process on P manually via command line since the GUI wouldn't come up and it wasn't duplicating on it's own from the nightly job. So I did a dpcmd check-pool-fileparts P:\ 1 which completed successfully. When I checked F in clouddrive, the usage has increased and there's 1TB+ queued. So it looks like it's duplicating. That's one good thing so far!

I went through this thread again from the beginning and noted a couple of clues and discrepancies. M & K did eventually get their drive letters back, just like F. However, when I said I had access to all the lettered drives via explorer and command prompt, I obviously (now) wouldn't have been able to check M & K because they didn't have drive letters. After the drive letters returned, I am not able to access them via windows explorer or command line. I suspect this is what's hanging up explorer on "This PC" - because it knows M & K are there but can't access them. I also wonder if this is what is preventing the drivepool GUI from loading completely.

>>It really seems like the issue is drivepool not running "properly". It's running enough to mount the pool drives and I can access them, but not enough to do the balancing or maintenance tasks or run the GUI. Yes, and I'm not sure how to proceed here. I'm also wondering why M and K lost their drive letters; as I'm understanding it those should be via CloudDrive, not DrivePool. Perhaps try a repair/reinstall of Microsoft .NET 4.8, just in case that's an issue, then try reinstalling DrivePool again (the latest release version is 2.3.8.1600 btw)? But given Explorer is now hanging on This PC you might need to open a support ticket with StableBit to get their help with this.

>>unless you manually copied anything between the poolparts (which should not cause DrivePool GUI's to hang anyway AFAIK).<< I did not. Thanks for the settings location. Got that backed up. >>DrivePool does a nightly duplication consistency check independent of balancing; I believe it will also automatically attempt to correct any duplication issues found rather than perform it as part of balancing. How far along is CloudDrive in uploading F's cache to the cloud?<< It does not appear to be duplicating or uploading from the cache. The size of F (and therefore L:) on disk and in the Clouddrive GUI has not changed since reattaching it (140GB). Of course I can't tell if the cache is empty or full from looking at the cache files on disk, but the GUI doesn't show anything to be uploaded (attached) >>Did you try TreeComp (or similar) to look for differences between Q and L?<< I did not because there's an obvious 2.86 TB difference between Q & L. >>Regarding the .NET processing, I'm not sure. I would be inclined to wait until F is finished uploading and checking whether your content in Q and L match before proceeding with anything that might break drivepool (further).<< I did let the install/repair continue running and it eventually completed with a "Repair failed - One or more issues caused the setup to fail. Please fix the issues and then retry setup. 0x80004004 - Operation aborted" It really seems like the issue is drivepool not running "properly". It's running enough to mount the pool drives and I can access them, but not enough to do the balancing or maintenance tasks or run the GUI. Another related symptom, though I don't know how it's related, is that when I run windows explorer (it defaults to opening "this PC") it hangs on "This PC" - like it can't see all the drives. However if I interrupt it and chose a path manually, then it shows the location normally.

In the GUI if you use the Cog icon -> Troubleshooting -> Service log... you can see DrivePool log warnings and errors as they occur, it can provide more information (like hopefully what directory); run the Troubleshooting -> Recheck duplication after and see what the log stream shows? I would try the ACL fix I linked too on the pool if you haven't already. If the culprit still can't be found/fixed you could open a support ticket with StableBit.

Seems to have resolved most of the problems but still getting a duplication error saying DrivePool N: directory not valid when it certainly is, and throwing the Duplication Inconsistent error. Both available options to "fix" the problem, Re-Balance or Re-Check Duplication, do nothing and lead back to the same error. I removed the "bad" 3tb drive from my pool and removed all the external drives for 3 NAS boxes and things are much quicker and several re-start issues (finding all the drives) have disappeared. But I still get Duplication errors with no easily visible way of proceeding to correct them. I have tried all of your suggestions above and they helped but didn't get rid of the error. If only the directory is invalid error told me what directory where. Thanks for your help so far Shane.

I can't say with absolute certainty that it couldn't have, but on the other hand all we've done outside the GUI (in terms of actual changes) so far is used dpcmd to ignore those poolparts, unless you manually copied anything between the poolparts (which should not cause DrivePool GUI's to hang anyway AFAIK). Your settings are the *.json files in your C:\ProgramData\StableBit DrivePool\Service\ and C:\ProgramData\StableBit DrivePool\Service\Store\Json\ folders in case you wish to back those up. DrivePool does a nightly duplication consistency check independent of balancing; I believe it will also automatically attempt to correct any duplication issues found rather than perform it as part of balancing. How far along is CloudDrive in uploading F's cache to the cloud? Did you try TreeComp (or similar) to look for differences between Q and L? Regarding the .NET processing, I'm not sure. I would be inclined to wait until F is finished uploading and checking whether your content in Q and L match before proceeding with anything that might break drivepool (further).

Applied some more Google-Fu and found this command GWMI -namespace root\cimv2 -class win32_volume | FL -property DriveLetter, DeviceID which gave me different GUIDs than from diskpart. I was able to match the volume from the logs to the GUIDs provided by that command. I think I have corrected the permissions from https://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/5810-ntfs-permissions-and-drivepool/ and will try a balancing pass. Thanks again,