CityguyUSA

I think that did the trick.

I got a junction on my StableBit disk that I cannot get rid of but it's complaing about it being invalid. I tried del, rmd using cmd and Powershell.

I tried running dpcmd delete-poolpart-reparse-points "x:\inbound" is the junction that I want to delete but I've not been able to using standard Window's options. Today I came across dpcmd and saw that it had a reparse point delete option but the result was "cannot open handle to volume". I'm not exactly sure what that means other than it's having the same problem as Windows effectively. Maybe the syntax is wrong the help display is not very explicit and therer are no examples showing how to set it up other than function parameter1, parameter 2. I ran it from an administrative cmd window. I tried with StableBit in-service and out-of-service. Version is 2.3.12.1683

There's an option under Manage Pool to turn off / on drive letters. Sorry, I thought this did all disks in the pool but it's just the pools main letter. I swore somewhere I came across this capability. I will update if I find it.

Guess there's no help coming.

I removed a drive the other day. Didn't think much about it. After it was removed I changed the drive name. Everything was fine as far as i knew until today 4/21 when I went looking for a backup of a file I wanted to restore and I couldn't access the pool. I launched Stablebit and it came up with the warning that a disk was missing which I wasn't expecting. When it opened it showed that the one partition I removed was still participating but 6 partitions are missing. I'm not sure what to do at this point.

Before I change those settings... Here is a copy of the message at the top of the File Placement dialog. It almost sounds as if it wants to move the entire 2.19TB of data from wherever it is (I'm assuming multiple drives) to one drive rather than writing seperate files to different drives.

Yes

Nothing. Still at the same place. It still looks like the last image I uploaded. I am curious about the unduplicated arrow on the bottom disk and why it's at a different place than the others?

I changed it. Should that kickoff a rebalancing?

I freed up about 2TB of space. I thought that would cause a rebalance but nothing so far.

This rule which is the one I talk about potecting the largest drive for files written to folder DriveV.

I didn't re-measure because it didn't seem like there was a measuring issue. It was telling me what I was seeing that it wasn't optimized and when I tried to do a manual re-balance it just would comeback and give the same result stating that it wasn't optimized... and even though I could see that there was plenty of room to move files from the drive that I had protected for larger files it just wouldn't. In the meantime a backup occured that has used up the remaining space on the "protected" drive that should have offloaded some files onto the smaller drives. I guess technically those files could still be moved off the unbalanced target is still at the same place on the protected drive. I just tried a re-measure but the result it still the same except now there's more that won't move. I don't know the size of the individual files except that it was saying that it had 741gb to move prior which there was empty space on the other drives that would have accomdated that. Now we're at an impass.

I know that's avalable but it's awkward. I would have to write down each drive because I can't remenber from one to the next let alone across many disks.

This is the message at the bottom of the screen when I hover over the balancing arrow. I just added a new drive and placed it in the order I want it filled using the Ordered File Placement balancer rules at the very bottom of this post. When I hover over the blue arrow it tells me there are 763GB available but it won't move the 641GB that it says should be moved?

Could you replace the used with free or add free space to the drive listing? I can't speak for others but I'm rarely looking for how much used space is on each drive. Free space would be much more helpful for me. Also how about sorting into the same order as the disks will be filled up? It's confusing to have them in one order in the balancer but then see them in an unrelated order here. If that's too complex because of all the balancers let us move them to the order we'd like to see them in.

My attempt to fix this is using balancing rules to write these bigger files to one particular disk in the pool. My biggest backup file is <3TB. I've set the balancing rules to fill-up the smallest drive first and then progress to the next largest until only the largest has remaining space. I've directed any file going to a specific folder to go only to the largest disk (I could just take out that larger drive from the pool but then I'm back where I started). It's not foolproof but seems to make failures less likely in my head. Do I also need to create an inverse rule to prevent other files from being written to the largest drive? Another option would be to setup drive pools only for the largest files so there would be no small files competing for big available spaces. In total I have 5 backups exceeding 1TB each. The problem is I'm not gaining much value of the drive pool because it doesn't split files across the drives in the pool. The pool drives need to be sized to some multiple of fairly specific sized files. I could split these larger drives into multiple partitions to reduce the backup size making the pool more viable but then the structure between the drives becomes more complex requiring links or mount points and more backups to schedule. Not undoable.

Reported available space by StableBit is listing 4.3tb on my server but this is misleading since no file will be split across drives that makeup that space. It really needs to show the maximum available free space on a single drive in the pool since that is the biggest file that can be stored in the pool.