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Edward

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Everything posted by Edward

  1. Wow eduncan911, what a comprehensive and well thought out reply. Really appreciate that. I need to go through your various points and if ok with you come back later on some of the more subsidiary points. Good idea of installing hardware first and then software for the reason you mention. I had already installed Drivepool and Scanner, however I will uninstall and then work from there. Re A: drive. That made me smile. I started life off with 5 1/4 inch floppies and MSDos 2.xx. Upgrading to 3.xx was a massive step! I use to access the internet long before html. God this ages me! Reading around the Covecube forums did reveal that running drivepool and/or scanner in VMs could be problematic so, yes, I will run them on the host. In fact due to the possible VM problems of running drivepool and scanner in a VM i discarded the idea of running exsi as the bare metal host. I need to think through your idea of only running an 'internal' nic in the VM setup and then 'sharing' the drivepool. Not sure what the advantages of that are beyond the 10gb apparent connection you mention. But even then I'm confused as to how such a bump in speed would come about given that, internally on the one machine the limit is to the sata data bandwidth and externally (one local machine to another) limited to a gigabit connection (am running cat6 ethernet here). But yes hyper-v allows three virtual NIC settings - external, internal and private. thx again for comprehensive response. E
  2. Hi Appreciate if someone could give me feedback that the process I'm about to follow will work ok. I'm currently moving my server duties from a machine running WHS11 to a new machine running win10 (I don't need domain controllers, client backups etc etc yet). Old WHS11 machine has 4 drives all drivepooled and mapped as P: Covecube scanner also running. steps to take: 1. Install stable releases of drivepool and scanner on W10. Enable 30 day licences. 2. On WHS11 machine deactivate licences for Drivepool and Scanner 3. Transplant 4 drives to new W10 machine. 4. Add the 4 drives to drivepool. 5. Somehow, automagically, drivepool will recognise the old drivepool settings from the WHS11 machine and recreate same drivepool (as P:) ??? 6. Check for consistencies/anomalies, correct as required. 7. Run scanner adding drives as required. Not sure if scanner will have to recheck all drives (currently being reported as healthy under WHS11). I assume it will have to. 8. Enable licences etc. 9. Be happy! Is that it? As a follow on I have installed Hyper-V within the W10 setup. That is working just fine. Question: Will the various VMs I create be able to see the pool as one large pool as well as read/write/delete? many thanks Edward
  3. Hi again Just to wrap this thread up. Installed, scanned and added to the pool a new 6TB WD Red. Initially, soon after adding the new drive, I saw about 3.5tb being reported as 'unusable for duplication' but then once all the balancing occurred this all went away and now is being reported as 'free space' so all good. The drive pool is showing a small amount of 15.2GB as unduplicated. I imagine this is simply some overhead but it would be nice (not essential) to be able to drill down and confirm. Maybe I set something somewhere to have certain files/folders as not duplicated but I don't where that setting would be. One big plus in having a drive nearly fail on me is that I did a lot of housekeeping which cleared things out nicely. In addition to the not needed 1tb folder lurking around I also deleted a whole load of movie videos which we realistically would never watch again. So now I have just over 7tb free space on a 12tb pool which is a good feeling. With a bit of effort I'm sure I can fill that quickly! Edward
  4. Re long names. Luckily the culprits were in one folder so I simply moved the folder to the root, renamed the offending files and moved the folder back again. Yeah WinDirStat is one of the tools in my toolbox. Simple, clean, fast. Re Windows 10. I have a Win10 new bare metal install already done, just waiting for you guys to give the green light and I will move my data drives over (thus replacing the WHS11 instance I have been using for ages). Edward
  5. Thanks for the feedback Christopher. As always great feedback and good transparency. A model that other businesses could well emulate and benefit from. My state of play now is that my pool is smaller (due to the pulled drive) and everything looks clean with all folders etc duplicated (save for some annoying long name files which I can't even kill or rename in DOS). New WD Red 6tb drive is currently being scanned and once it comes up clean overnight I will add to the pool. Thanks for your tip about possible infant mortality. I'm interested to see how the duplication balancing works out given the significant difference in drive sizes (pool will be comprised of 2*2tb, 1*3tb and 1*6tb). The pool will need to survive the 6tb drive going south. One good thing about all of this is I discovered an old temporary backup of something which was about 900gb which I no longer need and once I killed that my pool free space increased by 1.8tb. The not needed files were lurking deep in a folder somewhere. <oops>. Edward
  6. Well this process of dealing with a damaged drive has been not optimal in my opinion. The main thing is the lack of information on the UI as to confirming what, if anything, is happening in the background. Fully recognise that things will take ages but the UI is quite un-informative. Message display along the lines of "please wait whilst the system duplicates files in the background. This is estimated to take approximately another x hours/days/weeks". I have now pulled the damaged drive from the pool and now wait and see if things rebalance themselves. Couple of things: 1. UI reports missing drive. Was not obvious that I had to 'remove' the drive from the pool. I was expecting that to be automatic, but I guess it needs to be manual. 2. I received an email saying there was a missing drive (as expected). However after I removed the drive from the pool I received an email saying "All the missing disks have been re-connected and are no longer missing." which is untrue. Anyway, things now seem to be 'duplicating' again - I assume to duplicate the files/folders MIA (missing in action). One thing that came to mind whilst I was going through all these shenanigans is the lack of ability of finding out what files on specific drives were duplicated or not. It would be helpful if one could drill down in some way to ascertain this. For example on one of my drives I'm seeing 72.3gb unduplicated and 2.45tb duplicated. It would be useful to know what the 72.3gb comprises. NB: the only folder on this driver is the poolpart folder. But my key recommendation stands. That of providing a means for an end user to fast track an evacuation of a drive. One, additional way, of perhaps doing this is to simply zip up all the unduplicated contents of a failing drive and copy the zip file over to a non-failing drive and then duplicate from there. This will avoid, I assume, the vast overhead of dealing with thousands of small files on a failing drive. Of course it is better not to have any unduplicated files/folders. cheers Edward
  7. Christopher Thanks for the follow up. The 'remove' process never completed. I let it run for about 24 hours. I then aborted the process. (BTW, there was no obvious way - for me- of aborting the process so I had to go via task manager). When going back in I noticed that there were updates available so I did those. (ordinarily I never open the scanner or the drivepool software so did not realise there were updates. It would be great if a user could have it so that updates are notified via, say, the scanner notification email process. Just a thought). Anyway the updates seem to have placed me into a new 'measuring' process (but I may have done that manually?). That process is still ongoing (several hours). I have also set the options you mentioned so I assume once the measuring process is completed the evacuation of data will start. But maybe it has also started? It is not clear from the UI. Scanner also started a new scan on all drives and, except for the suspicious drive the other drives have been scanned and reported healthy. I will let things run until all scans, measurements and evacuation have occurred or the drive fails (whichever comes first). I plan on replacing the suspect drive with a WD Red 6tb which seems to have good reports. But welcome your opinion on that. The poolpart folder on the suspect drive is about 1 tb and comprises > 200k files so I imagine will take some time to evacuate. I discovered a large folder on the suspect drive which was not part of the pool. In fact it was a copy of the previous OS install. That had over 80k files and trying to delete that via Windows Explorer (even bypassing the recycle folder) was gonna take over a day. So I paused and remembered good ole DOS. 5 Minutes later and use of del /s/q and rmdir /s/q did the trick. I'd highly recommmend that within the Drivepool UI an option for removing a drive using your settings (balancer, uncheck of dup/undups etc) is implemented. At the very least a link to some helpfile. This will avoid a user having to make the whole drivepool read only. Also I would recommend that some status update and estimate of completion (within the UI) is provided. Sitting and watching a screen and doubting if real progress is being made is somewhat frustrating. cheers Edward
  8. Thanks Chris, lots to chew on. Let me look at this in the morning please (you may recall I'm in London, UK). As of now, some 13 hours after I kicked off the process, it is still reporting 'removing drive'. I used default remove options (shift-remove). Quick stats are: unduplicated: 73gb duplicated: 1,023gb 151gb: other Free: 1.51TB I will let the process continue overnight. SMART reported the drive will fail in the next 24 hours. I hope to get the data evacuated before then. cheers Edward
  9. Am in the process of removing a drive from my pool due to repeated SMART warnings (head parking on a Seagate 3tb drive). The process has apparently been going on for some time now (ca. 3 hours). However, except for the bar at the bottom saying removing drive, there is no evidence that anything is happening. In particualr there is no 'disk activity' being indicated. Is there anything I can do to actually verify that the process is working as it should in the background? Is there any way I can ascertain how long the process is likely to take? Ballpark figure would be fine. Am running drivepool 2.1.1.561 under WHS11. thx Edward
  10. Thanks drashna. Yes on a different machine here I use an SSD. Difference? Night and day. I'll open a new thread (probably over at Homersever Show) as I believe there may be an issue with regards to Windows Server 2012R2 and HP Microsever's onboard network controller. But for sure my understanding of DrivePool is that it is essentially 'move the disks over' as you say. Quick question if I may? Any issues on running Drivepool 2.x and then, later on, using DrivePool 1.x on same pool? For example if I use Windows Server 2012R2 and then wish to regrade to WHS2011? Will I still see the pools correctly - or is it a one way street? cheers Edward
  11. Thanks Drashna, whilst using WHS2011 I will stick with Drivepool 1.3 then. I'm thinking of installing WHS2012R2 on a spare SSD drive. I'll raise a new topic on that in terms of steps to be taken. cheers Edward
  12. I have a similar question if I may? Best practice question. I'm currently on Drivepool 1.3.7550 and see that version 2.x is available. Running on WHS11. Ideally I would like to simply download the latest version, run it and all will work. Is this correct? @drashna, above you seem to be recommending uninstalling old versions. Is this true in my situation as well? Surely I would lose all my pool settings and whatnot? I have similar questions regarding Scanner. There I'm running version 2.3.2886, not sure what the upgrade process is. cheers Edward
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