cocksy_boy

Hi, I've been doing some shuffling of data to some new drives and installation to a new system. The problem i have is that I've not quite got enough internal disks or system infrastructure in my home environment to simply copy all my data from the old to the new, so I'm having to do it bit by bit (no pun intended). I've come to a minor conundrum; and my question is: is it better to a. Add 2 empty disks to a pool, turn on duplication and then copy the data to the new pool and let it duplicate as it copies the data to the pool? or b. Copy the data to a new single disk, then add another disk to the pool and turn on duplication? Option b is going to be slightly less risky for me as it means I have less data to shuffle round and am able to another copy of it while I an writing to the new pool. I can then check and make sure there is no issue before wiping the other drive and adding it to the poo, although it might then take a long time to duplicate the data (about 2.5 TB). I suspect option a will be more efficient, as it will simultaneously write to 2 disks, rather than to one then duplicating to another later on, but are there any other issues / pros / cons? Any help greatly appreciated!

Thanks guys!

yeah, its a 100% duplication, so I think I'll set WHS to backup one of the virtual data disks. Thanks!

Hi All, I've been using DrivePool 1.X on my old WHS 2011 system for a while, but am in the process of upgrading to a new server setup based on Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 with WHS 2011 in a VM and I'm taking the opportunity to switch to Drivepool 2.X at the same time. My question is similar to one I posted a long time ago (here), but was wondering if things have changed since I last asked (i searched and couldn't see a similar question / answer!): I have 2 x 2TB virtual "data" drives in the WHS 2011 VM which are set to duplicate everything in them. I want to use the built in WHS 2011 backup to backup all the data onto another 2TB virtual drive ("backup") on the WHS 2011 VM. So my question is what's the best policy for backing up the disk; do I: 1. Set the WHS 2011 backup to backup the Drivepool drive. My concern is I don't want to backup 2 copies of every file, but the combination of the previous version of Drivepool & WHS 2011 backup couldn't tell the difference and would have backed up both copies of all files. This would soon fill up my backup drive in no time, and is overkill for my needs - I only need to backup once on top of the duplication! OR 2. Set the WHS 2011 backup one of the "data" drives? Option 1 would seem like the neater option as long as it doesn't back everything up twice! Option 2 would work and I don't think there would be any issues if that's the only way ahead - unless I'm mistaken. Cheers,

my other thought is get another 2TB disk and then duplicate 100% of the contents across 2 of the 2TB drvies and only backup one of them to the backup drive.....

Hmmm. bugger. might have to re-assess then...! Thanks for the info!

uh oh. maybe I don't quite understand the "file placement limiter" properly then....!! I have 3 HDDs for data: 2TB, 1TB, and 500GB and a 2TB disk for backup. So what I wanted to do was make sure all my data is on the 2TB disk, and the folders that are duplicated had duplicates on the 1TB and 500GB drives. THen I set up WHS to back up just the 2TB disk. So I changed the settings on the 1TB and 500GB disks so they only contain duplicated files. have I done it wrong....?!!?!

Hmmm..... yeah - that's an option. I kind of like the history you get with a regular dedicated backup set, rather than *just* another copy! Your option would work really well if I could turn on MS file history on the drives inside the pool, but I don't think that works, does it? I'm currently re-distributing my pool so that some drives only contain duplicates using the file placement limiter and then changing the MS backup options to exclude the drives that only have duplicates - this will drastically reduce the size of my backup set, but it taking a while to do, funnily enough! I was half tempted to look at building a win 8.1 machine as a server, and possibly running WHS in a virtual machine, but I'm not quite there yet! Not sure if I need it or not, and haven't got the cash to fork out on a whole new set of drives and hardware to test it out.

Hey there, sorry for dragging up this old thread, but are there any plans to 'fix' this in the future? i.e. for the pool to appear as a drive in the WHS 2011 backup list so it can be backed up rather than the individual drives? I have a lot of photos and videos on my pool on my WHS 2011 server, and whilst they are duplicated, they take up twice the space on the backup - I've pretty much reached my 2TB WHS backup limit, adn trying to work out what to do next!! Thanks.