Umfriend

So I am at work now and having RDPed in I can confirm it is the same as it was. Additional info: - Shadow Copies are disabled on both HDDs - Balancer plug-ins are all at default

Rechecking as I write: Yes, both show up as 1.82TB drives in the DP small mouse-over window (what's that called anyway?). The F:\ however states Duplicated 730 GB, Other 378MB, Free space 1.11TB. E:/ just does not give any info (see attachment previous post). In Windows Explorter, they show as same capacity and free space (bar 0.01TB) which is due to sysvolumeinformation. If I do a properties tab on both poolpart folders I get the exact same number of files , space used and space on disk. I then press remeasure again. The bars get equally long, both grey (as does the big circle graph), both mouse-overs show data on space. What I find strange is that the bottom bar is expanding/shrinking over and over and above it it says "Balancing..."?!? An OCD-note: is there any way it could show _progress_, so " xx% done"? How long should it take, it's 20 minutes now. Numbers have been all over the place, i.e., Unduplicated went from 237MB to 65GB and then back, as if it starts over. From Resource Monitor I learn that DP.Service.exe is not actually having a lot of IO. 40 mins now, I need to go. WIll RDP in from work. I've taken quite a few screenprints from the DP in the Dashboard, if you want I can mail/upload them somewhere.

Hi all, I have got this very simple Pool: 2 x 2TB (1.81TB in explorer), pool file duplication on. The physical drives are E:\ and F:\ and Windows tells me 1.1TB is free on both. Properties on the poolpart folders tell me 730GB in use for both. Why is the bar for E:\ that much longer? Why does the small window that pops-up when I mouse over it not present a legenda and sizes? If I mouse over F:\, I get the legenda + sizes. It's the exact same type of HDD. I have tried remeasuring (and it helped a bit, prior to that the bar for E:\ was wholly blue and it got me freaking that it might be nearly full). I know systemvolumeinformation can be obfuscating but in this case it is empty on F:\ and just 2.95GB on E:\ and that is the Ünusable for duplication" below Pool Options. Edit: Properties also tells me exact same number of files/size in both poolpart folders, I have no reason to assume any file is not dumplicated. Kind rgds, Umf

I wonder which software does that. Windows does not in explorer. Excel does not if you sort by a column with such values. SQL Server does not. I really can't think of software that realises that if there are numbers in a string/textfield, it should sort by parsing numbers out of text and use that as a sort parameter. In fact, this is a feature/innovation that might still be patentable ;-)

I think the official answer is that as long as the count does not increase, you're probably OK. Now I have never had HDD issues until recently and in that short experience, once they arise, they rise in numbers. I have had chkdsk /r and formating (not quick formatting) seamingly correct errors (according to Windos) but the next scan would show these again. My policy now is, once I get them I may give them *one* more chance. Otherwise, my son and I love to tear them apart and play around with them. It's a bit of a thrill holding just the motor with the disks spinning at 7200RPM.

I share your pain, well not on this specific thing, I ain;t got > 9 drives, but in general. The solution I have is in the naming convention which includes preceding zeros... Yes: Disk 01, Disk 02 etc. and a lot of renaming by the time you get to disk 100 ;-)

One question: I believe you have a Pool of 1x1TB and 1x3TB. Do you have duplication enabled? If so, than 1TB will be the max capacity of the Pool (for duplicated files) because it can only write 1TB to the smaller drive and requires duplicated files to reside on seperate disks.

Yes, any space on a disk that contains data (outside of the poolparts folder) is not available to the Pool. Any space on a disk that is then freed as files are deleted will be available to the Pool (assuming you do not limit DPs usage of the drive in any way).

AFAIK, no. Perhaps also becuase within a Pool you may set duplication on/off on a folder basis, hard to predict how much you can store then. But I get confused about this all the time as well.

OK, I misunderstood your question then. I just copied a 2.7GB file from the Pool to a disk on which part of the Pool resides. With me DP only shows Read activity, no write activity, as I would expect. Running WHS2011 without any virtualisation of whatever sort. I also copied a file from the Poolpart folder (which is the Pool on that drive but through NTFS, not CoveFS) to the same drive outside the Pool. DP showed no I/O, as expected. So to me it seems that your experience is weird and unexpected indeed and I can not recreate it.

I don't think it does. Why would WHS need to know that? It reads from one physical drive and write to a virtual CoveFS drive which, for WHS will be different drives. Not much different I guess if one virtual PC downloads a file from another virtual PC within the same machine and both are allocated a bit of the same physical drive. The file would be copied from and to one individual physical drive without *any* OS actually being aware of this, right? I wonder whether you (or I in the other case) understand Christophers idea: if you set up the server such that client backups are made to one individual drive as opposed to a Pool and the backup behaviour remains the same then it can not be a DP issue. To test, I guess the easiest way is to move the client computer backups Server Folder off the Pool to a "real" harddisk and then do a backup of a client.

Oh, take a look at http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/37-faq-unduplicated-vs-duplicated-vs-other-vs-unusable/ Basically, not all files on a drive are duplicated such as the deeper hidden systemvolumeinformation folder (and other files saved outside the poolpart folders on a drive). I have about 4.3GB Other and have seen far higher numbers (I think with people who have Shadow Copies enabled).

In my experience and that is withou using any add-ins (to DP), if you copy/save/move files to a Pool (not to a underlying drive), it is duplicated right away, i.e., it is saved on two disks instantly. All other duplication that may occur "later", I think, relates to (a) setting duplication to a larger number and/or ( copy/save/move files to a poolpart folder (or subfolder therof) on an individual drive. Luckilly, Drashna or Shane will dorp by to explain how it really works. What exactly have you done and observerd?

I imagine the other backup software vendors do not use VSS. AFAIK, it is the server backup solution that relies on VSS and I assume Alex would have to understand how VSS works so that he can determine what he needs to do in the CoveFS filesystem/virtual drive setup so that VSS will run well on it. (Or, otherwise put, what would a Pool drive need to do for it to support VSS?) But I could be very wrong on this.

I would look at (and perhaps post some screenprints) of resmon.exe I should have writespeeds way over 100Mb/s but don't get anywhere near that when duplicating. Sure, lots of little files will cause lower speeds perhaps but active times / disk queue length reported indicated not a lot was happening. How's that with you?

I would second that. In my experience, any migration/reinstall etc is way faster when one holds the files outside the Pool (one way or the other), creates a Pool with duplication and then moves/copies the data to the Pool. Sure, I have little data (600GB or so) so it is feasible but for those who have like 10TB of data or so it may virtually impossible. It almost appears as if balancing/checking/duplicating runs sooo deep in the background that it hardly takes any resources at all. It would be helpfull if, one way or the other, a user could temporarily allow DP high priority or something. That is assuming my impressions are anywhere near correct of course. @TeeeBear: how are you without backups? WHS 2011 Server Backup does not backup Pools, only the underlying harddisks. So _if_ you are running backups on those HDDs _then_ you should have backups (and those increasingly would backup up duplicate files).

You did, I hope, notice the attempt at a smiley? I absolutely love the cautious approach. It's the reason I never sync anything, to afraid to have deleted all copies if/when I only want to delete one on one device.

Can't it do _anything_ by itself? ;-)

Willem, I am not sure about this: WHS Backup allows you to restore in two ways: (a) individual files and ( whole drives / systems. A Pool is not a drive. It's a virtual drive, sure, but it is not the same thing. A bare metal restore would then try to restore files to a virtual drive for which no driver (DP) is present yet. Another issue is that Pools may well be in excess of 2 TB and WHS Server Backup does not support backups of volumes in excess of 2GB.

I think davey means to say that you can _not_ browse to the driveletter that designates the Pool but rather need to browse to the actual physical drives that comprise the Pool(s) and, if you only need to backup the Pool and not the (other) files on those drives that are not part of the Pool, to the serverpoolpart folders on those physical drives.

Thanks. I guess I keep forgetting that DP is simply a very advanced layer over normal NTFS folders, so, nothing special ;-). I could have known this as I know that if you replace a file on one of the drives, the check will find out that the two same files one the two drives are not actually equal (read somesuch in relation to restore of single HDD in Pool).

Yeah, I wonder about that: Why wouldn't I copy (from other system / external enclosure) or restore individual files to the Pool? Seems to me I want DP to deal with file placement etc. Another related Q: Can I copy a bunch of files directly to a poolpart folder on one drive and would DP do balancing _and_ duplication (if set)?

So, my first suggestion won't work as DP will not let you write to the Pool with a missing disk (which makes sense IMO). But the second revised will/should work if I understand correctly. Just never delete anything (which I suggested in my first post, SHAME ON ME!). Drashna's amendment using another system, I think, has even less risk. Someday I'll have a real test / mess around system to try things like these. For now, yours serves as that ;-) Oh, and _if_ you've got the means to install enough capacity to enable duplication (which in your case would require 4x4TB drives it seems to me) than I would like to echo Drashna's suggestion. I'm learning a lot from him (and I'll replace my sys HD with an SSD someday).

Joe, I got the 2T-part of Pool bit, hence the "ignore missing disk msgs" part. I now actually think that might well be the best way to go. I am assuming that DP will let you write to the Pool even while a disk is missing. My other suggestion was less well though through as deleting from the 500GB drive might cause balancing to transfer yet other files to it. That can be stopped but it just introduces more steps and risk factors IMO. So I would in that scenario: 1. Remove 500 GB drive from computer 2. Remove 500 GB drive from Pool (now the files are realy lost, DP accepts they no longer exist). 3. Change 500 GB drive for new 2TB disk and add to Pool 4. Restore files for Server, individual files, select 500GB drive, all files/floders within the poolpart folder and restore to other location being the Pool I am assuming that you use the WHS 2011 standard server backup function and that it can in fact write to the Pool (AFAIK, it can not backup the Pool, only the underlying actual drives). If any of this goes wrong, you can always (I think): - Change the new 2TB back for 500 GB Drive; or, - Borrow an external enclosure to copy from the 500 GB drive to the Pool. Luckilly, there are people here who actually know about these things

Perhaps when v1 starts running, it picks up the poolpart directories but has an initial setting of non-duplication so that it deletes one copy of those? I'm on v2.x now but I can not remember being able to set duplication in v1.x other than on a per serverfolder basis, IIRC.