ikon

Agreed, very clever. My father really believed in the KISS principle, so he set up his backup system so it makes physical copies to other sets of drives. So, he has a total of 5 drives sets:
Main Storage
NearLine Storage
MyDocumentsReserve Storage
OffSite A Storage
OffSite B Storage
As you might suspect, Main Storage is where all files go when they're created. It's also where the vast majority of files are read from when other computers access the server. These drives mounted in the server chassis and connected by SATA.
NearLine Storage is a USB3-connected Lian-Li 5-drive enclosure, currently with 3 drives.
MyDocumentsReserve is an extra copy of only the My Documents folder on Main Storage. This is the most critical data of all, so it gets an extra measure of security.
OffLine A and B Storage are 2 sets of drives that are swapped in and out of a second USB3-connected Lian-Li 5-drive enclosure. One of the sets of drives is kept off site. My father swapped them in and out of the enclosure every day. I'm not that dedicated; I swap them more like once a week. Both sets are in the house overnight on the day of a  swap over but, other than that, one set is at another site.
Every night, at 2AM, a set of CMD files is run by a single Scheduled Task. These CMD files use RoboCopy to copy the My Documents folder on Main Storage to MyDocumentsReserve. Then, having backed up the most critical files, all the files on Main Storage (including the My Documents folder again) are copied first to NearLine, then OffSite A or B (whichever set is currently in the enclosure).
Because of the way RoboCopy works, only new and changed files are physically copied, so the process is pretty quick
This procedure ensures there are 4 copies of everything; 5 copies of My Documents.
My father used to tell me that many people told him his system is overkill, but he would then tell me he has never lost a file completely since implementing it. Soooo, why would I mess with it.... it works.

Yeah. Hard to imagine lowering the price. It's already very reasonable.

The removal of the 8TB 3ware drive from my MainStorage Pool completed sometime in the wee hours this morning. I removed the drives, and the 3ware card, then moved the replacement drives (2x4TB, 1x2TB, 1x1.5TB) into the slots emptied by the removal of the 2x2TB drives. So far, good.
Then, when I went to boot up, it wouldn't. After a few tries, I managed to get the system to enter the BIOS. I went to the Boot section. It showed one of the hard drives as the first boot device, and the DVD drive as the second. I pressed Enter to get a list of drives, so I could pick the Intel SSD that I installed Windows 10 on. It wasn't there. Hmmmm...
So, I went to the Disk Drives item and hit Enter. It showed 12 drives, none of them the Intel SSD. Double hmmmmmm.
I futzzed around with the connections and stuff and, finally, I managed to get the Intel SSD to show up. I picked it as the boot device and it worked. Not sure of all what I did, but I guess it's better to be lucky than good

Late this afternoon the 6TB HGST hard drive I ordered on sale from NewEgg arrived. I put it into my OffSite Lian-Li enclosure, added it to the OffSite A pool, and am in the process of removing the 4TB drive that was part of the pool. It's going slowly, but seems to be working. The 4TB drive that's coming out will then replace a 2 or 3 TB drive in the NearLine pool, giving both pools another terabyte or 2 of room.
 
Hopefully, with Christmas sales coming up, I will be able to get another couple of 6TB drives that I can use to replace the 4x2TB drives that make up most of the MainStorage pool (that's the one that's showing the sector errors). That, in turn, will free up another 4TB drive that can be used to expand the OffSite B pool. When it's all done, every pool should have no less that 1TB of free space, and most should have 2TB. That will last me a while.

Well, I ran chkdsk /r /scan /perf again, and this time it got to a Stage 5. I didn't see it do that last time. Anyway, apparently Stage 4 checks only sectors that are currently being used by files and Stage 5 checks the ones that are currently unused.
 
Stage 5 found 3 more areas (again, remember, this is over 4 drives, not just 1). It said it was flagging the areas for later repair. After it finally finished I ran chkdsk /spotfix. This took overnight to complete (well, I got tired of waiting for it to finish so I went to bed). It did complete though. I then went to Scanner and tried a Surface Scan. It sill said there are bad sectors and flagged the drive as Damaged. So, I went into the options for that drive and told it to Not do Surface Scans. At least, that way, I can still use the drive without Scanner preventing me from writing files. To be honest, despite what Scanner says, I haven't noticed any issues with the drive. And, since chkdsk has done its own scan of all the sectors, I'm hoping I'm fairly safe. And there's always the fact that I have quite a lot of backup. Between them all, I figure I'm not too bad off.
 
Oh, and I did something today that I think is pretty geeky: I set up OpenVPN on my (Dad's) Untangle box, something even he hadn't done. I had some missteps, and had to get help from the Untangle forums, but I was able connect up my Surface tablet to my phone's Internet Sharing and then use
Windows Explorer to get to the files on my new Windows 10 server. And, thanks to an article by a guy named pcdoc, I found out what Full
Tunnel means and got it to work. Now, when I'm away from home, I can surf the net as safely as if I was still at home. Pretty cool. Sorry, I know this is off topic: I hope that's OK.

I would like to humbly request that the known issues post in Nuts and Bolts be updated. For example, which is the latest stable Beta release? Thx.

OK, first, just in case any one here knows of Ikon, let me say, I'm not him. Ikon was my father. I say 'was' because he passed away in 2012. I inherited all his tech, including his forum and social media accounts, software licences, etc. Anyway, I am not the techie he was but, for the past 5 years, I've been learning. His notes, emails, forum posts, and just things we talked about over the years have been invaluable in getting me more up to speed.
 
That said, in the past couple of days I've picked up a couple of things about DrivePool that I thought might be helpful to another newbie at some point.
 
I had a 3-drive pool set up, and it was working fine until Scanner found some unreadable sectors on 1 of the drives and labelled it as Damaged. I tried Removing the drive from the pool, but it wouldn't work. The pool's whole page was kind of grayed out: I couldn't do anything on it.
 
I shut down the computer, removed the 'damaged' drive, then booted up. DrivePool said the drive was missing (yup, it was; good of you to notice), but I still couldn't Remove it.
 
I moved all of the data folders from the PoolPartGUID folder on each of the 3 drives to the root of each drive. Then I deleted the PoolPartGUID folders.... all except for one that simply would not delete. I got an error every time. This particular PoolPartGUID folder had a .covefs folder in it. It always seems to be that specific PoolPartGUID folder that won't delete.
    I finally got around this issue by getting Properties on the PoolPartGUID folder, going to Security, then Advanced, and giving Ownership of the folder to my account. After messing around with it a few times I was able to delete the folder.
 
However, deleting the folder didn't completely solve the problem. Even though none of the drives had a PoolPartGUID folder on it any longer, DrivePool refused to list the drives in the list of non-pooled drives. Somehow, it thought the drives were still part of a pool, even though it no longer would display a page for that pool. I could have gotten around the issue by use Disk Manager to delete & recreate the partitions from all the drives, but I had almost 4TB of data on them. That's a lot of recopying. It was a Catch-22.
 
Thanks to this forum, and Courtney (who is the most awesome tech support rep I've ever dealt with), I found out about the Reset All Settings feature, although it took me a couple of minutes to find it (it's in the Troubleshooting section in the tiny gear icon in the top right area of the DrivePool window). After resetting the settings, the 3 drives showed up in the list of non-pooled drives, and I was able to build a new pool with them.
 
Many thanks to the posters in this forum, and many, many, many thanks to Courtney. Stablebit/CoveCube is very lucky to have him.
 
 

As the question implies, I would like to know if the process of creating a drive pool can be easily reversed. DP does a great job of letting you create a pool and add drives to it. What if I just want to reverse that process?
 
I know I can remove drives from a pool, but I don't think that's the same thing. If I remove a drive, DP has to go through all kinds of rigmarole to move the data to the drives remaining in the pool. What about just moving the files & folders to where they were on the same drive before the pool was created and deleting the DP related files & folders? I would think this could be done a lot more quickly than removing a drive. Possible?
 
Does deactivating a licence do this?
 
Alternatively, is there a way to simply delete a pool?
 
What about shutting down Stablebit DrivePool Service and reformatting the drives that are in the pool? Maybe I could just move the files in the hidden folder up to the root and delete the pool related files manually?