cryodream

I need to move my server to the another. Current one is running windows 8.1, the new one is windows 10. What is the best way to move drive pool and all the settings (if possible) to the new machine? The ideal situation would be to have exact same DrivePool setup on the new machine as the old one, so all the programs, that use the pool could be easily transferred by simply exporting settings, reinstalling on the new machine and importing settings... How do I transfer the license? The same situation for Scanner. Whats the best way to migrate to the new machine?

@Wiidesire Do not use, or at least do not think of buying WhereIsIt. I am using it, because I have bought it like 10 years ago. It was, maybe even still is the best at cataloging files and folders on drives. But it has serious problems. It has been, basically abandoned. Even here it shows up as discontinued: Where Is It? - AlternativeTo.net The program also has a single dev, but not like guys here. That one is a real asshole. Check out comments on AlternativeTo (the link above). and I, myself can attest to that - I had a displeasure of a support email exchange with him. Fuck that guy. The program never has before or most definitely never will have any community forums, or any other kind of support, except email with that idiot. Which you better avoid. I think, that's enough reasons to stay away... I myself am gonna try out this: Free Disk Catalog Software for Windows - WinCatalog 2017 There was never a good alternative to WhereIsIt before, but this seems promising. I need something "evolving" for this kind of stuff. This one is also paid, if you want all the features. but it looks good and not dead. Well, check it out yourself. My job was to warn you. Good luck.

I am sorry for this post, but it needs to be said. I was so exited when I found DrivePool and Scanner about 2 years ago, that I bought the whole "package" right then and there. I think I even own a licence for CloudDrive, though I never tried it I've been keeping myself from posting a rant for a looong time now. But after reading this thread, it's just too much... Long story short - my setup is 50+ drives in one pool, with a million plus files. A lot of points made below stem from this - having lots of drives with a shitload of files. Scattered all over files 1. DrivePool, for some ungodly reason, scatters files willy-nilly, like a shot from the shotgun (I know there are reason(s), I read something by Alex somewhere, but I don't think, they're good enough to warrant this situation). At least it's by default. And actually that's a "preferred" type of operation, as I understand. Why there isn't an option to keep files together in the same folder structure, is beyond me. For example how unRAID does it. Further-more unRAID could get away with scattering files wherever, because it uses parity for protection, not duplication. Drivepool, on the other hand - cannot get away with this (more on that later). IMHO, this is the biggest flaw in DrivePool, so it bears repeating. No folders splitting. Or rather a really good system to setup the folders splitting. Again - look at unRAID and do what they're doing. i.e.: splitting of TV Shows when copying to the pool. Now - all the shows have most of the episodes scattered on all 50+ drives. Stupid. 2. Simple real life example (my home server). At the "height" of my excitement with DrivePool, and by that I mean the days just after I found/bough/installed it on my server, I put all my spinners (on my server) in a pool. That's 50+ drives in a single pool. I loved the convenience of the pool and navigating/finding everything easily. I have setup 2x duplication on some folders, not all the of pool (not all files need protecting). Anyway, some weeks later my first drive died, while using DrivePool. Fuck. Not because drive died - no - because the first thing I obviously needed to know was - what files have I lost. I came to the forums, and quickly found, that even though DrivePool's half of functionality is file security (by a way duplication) - it does not keep track of files on the pool, in any shape or form. Fakme. Now that was stupid, I thought to myself. Especially, if you gonna throw my files around the disks, where I have no idea where they actually are - how the fuck can you not keep track of them, so you could tell me, what I've lost if a drive dies? And up to this day, I have no idea what I've actually lost, just that it was ~3TB of stuff. Love it After that happened, I had a thought and stopped using duplication. Actually, of course, the first thing I've done was to setup auto-scanning of the DrivePool pool every 6 hours with WhereIsIt, so the next time a drive dies, I would at least be able to know what the hell I've lost. Once again - I need a third party tool to keep track of my files. I'm sorry, but this is inexcusable. Please, do not mention the "Ordered File Placement" plug-in. Of course, drives need to be filled evenly, not one at a time. For speed, for wear and tear, what have you. Just simply, don't scatter files - keep them together. 3. A shitload of empty folders in the drives are driving me nuts. With this scattering of files there are probably more freaking empty folders on the drives than actual files. Dafuk. 4. At the very least - implement file and folder access in the balancer development (IIRC, now you can't), so I could write my own implementation of keeping files and folder on the same disks, if you don't want to... Because this madness with file placement is making the program unusable. Reasons - below. 5. I have been using DrivePool for the last 1,5, at least - just because I am too lazy to disband the pool and then manually restore the order in all that mess that DrivePool created. But I'm finishing up writing a little program, that will do it for me, so fingers crossed... I might get back some sanity in my file system, soon. Anyone know of a tool which would help in this? Really lazy to code now... Duplication 6. I've been eagerly waiting for grouping of drives, to finally make duplication usable. Yes, I said it. Because as it is now - duplication is unusable. Not even close. Anyone having 2x duplication and lots of drives and lots of files is actually bound to loose a shitload of files in case more than 1 drive fails at the same time. And with quality of drives nowadays - good luck... And if you don't believe me, think about it - I'll describe my reasoning in the following points: Like I mentioned before, after loosing my first drive in the pool, I disabled the duplication. The reason was simple - I did some thinking. I have 50+ drives, probably a million plus files. DrivePool scatters files to as many drives as it can, whenever it can. If 2 drives die - how many files would actually have both copies on those drives (1 copy on each drive with 2x duplication). The answer is not zero. 100% - some files would get lost. And if someone offers me to do 3x duplication, then can I haz some of your money, plz... It's been too long for me to remember how to actually do the probability math, but simple logic dictates - that duplication would not help me at all to keep all my files safe, in case 2 drives go tits up at the same time. Basically, the more drives you have, the more files you have - the more fucked you are with 2x duplication. And remember... on top of that you will have no fucking idea, what files you have just lost... enjoy... 7. Now I see the drive groups arrived. And it's still does not fix the above problem. Am I understanding this correctly - you can make same old-style pools which can have duplication settings inside them and separately from one another. And then you pool those pools together? So they do not duplicate from one pool to another pool? Why the hell not? Isn't this, like, the first and only thought process, how to do this type of drives grouping, with the duplication in mind? What the hell, seriously... However many drives you have - split them in the middle by the age (how old they are) and that's your 2 groups. This way, all the oldest drives are duplicated into the all the newest drives. And you are sure, that each file has at least one copy in a new drive. Isn't that obvious? Want more than 2x duplication - split into more groups, but again, use common sense and group them drives by age. And duplicate between groups! 8. And anyway, duplication of 100TB+ or more of media files, seriously? Would love to be that rich, so it wouldn't hurt the wallet. How about implementing a SnapRAID over the pool. With cache/landing disk (or landing disks group) that would be easy. To keep all the files always secured: files get copied to duplicated landing disks. Then, in the background they get copied to the snapraid protected pool drives. Snapshot gets updated. Now that files are properly secured on the pool by snapraid - they can be deleted from the landing disks. Result - no wasted money and drives on a stupid duplication and files are protected way way better with multiple parities, if you want, and checksumming against bitrot and some-such. If it's impossible for you to use another free program like that in your paid software - give as an option to do it ourselves, by keeping the fucking files together. Because, I would've done things this way ages ago, if not for the stupid shit DrivePool does whenever it wants. Balancing 9. Balancing. Don't get me started... Stop this fucking Apple-like magic, where program does whatever it wants, and I have no clue what the hell is going on. Instead, show it to me. Because magic-like operation is nice, sometimes, but not here. And it must work perfectly 100% of the time. If not - I'm an idiot who doesn't know what the hell is going on with his own files on his own computer. And DrivePool is far from 100% perfect. And I'm not expecting it to be. It is a mirracle, as it is, with only 1 dev working on it. 10. This bears repeating. Show me what the fuck DP is doing and especially - why. Not the same single meaningless phrase on the GUI - "moving files because whatever". But actually, moving these files from this drive to this drive, because of this balancer, or these file placement rules changes, etc... 11. Add an option to simulate balancing and let me choose what or if I wanna do it. 12. Add option to force re-balancing. Better still, to force re-balancing on individual balancer. 13. For the love of god - give me an option to manually control (start/stop) the balancing. Let me select which drives I want to balance, with which balancer(s), so when I fire up the balancer, it would not go and do some shit I do not care for and waste time and my patience. When I change the file placement rules, I probably always want to balance something specific. Just... let me. 14. It would be nice, to able to prioritize balancing actions. Like a queue. This would be very helpful on big re-balancing jobs. That's, if we ever get control of balancing. Settings 15. SSD Optimizer title for a balancer is confusing. Change it to Landing Disk or Cache Drive or something similar. Because that's was it does, basically. 16. The minimum free space should be set in one and only one place . Multiple balancers have it - why!? Also, there is percent and size based settings at the same time - again - why? In short, leave the free space settings only in Prevent Drive Overfill and that's it, only with ability to set free space per drive basis, if we want. Drives now come in 1-10TB, most commonly, which is a huge difference. 17. Filter (file/folder placement rules) also by size. eg: maybe I would want all the metadata for movies and tv shows to be placed on the ssd, so the spinners would contain only big video files. Less fragmentation. Speed accessing metadata. That'd be neat. UI 18. OK, let's move on onto another awful thing. The GUI. Talk about style over substance. Should I drop a screenshot of the DrivePool GUI in full-screen on a 21:9 ultra-wide screen monitor, or is it easy enough for anyone to actually imagine, how ridiculously unpractical it is, without even seeing it? Starting with having a program in 3440x1440 resolution and still not being able to see even half of my drives in a list. Stupid wasted desktop real estate galore. I have never ever seen anything like this before, ever. 19. The drives list is also wasted space. And of course - there's no way to see all your drives at once. Have too many drives - scroll through this one listview, never-mind there's plenty of space all around for a different view displaying more/all the drives in a wrap panel. 20. Disk performance view at the bottom right - you will see activity for only 5 files - and that's it. That's all you get. What the hell? I seriously wonder, how this decision got made. The main reason the program was created, was to manage files - but if you want to know anything about what's going on with those files - I'll show you only 5. Fuck the rest. You have 10 transfers... more...? Does not matter - 5, I say. Better look at that huge pie-chart, pretty, isn't it?... 21. Want to change some settings for the pool? Here's a universal icon for settings at the top on the right, nice and pretty intuitive... oh, wait... shit. That is not the options - what the hell? Oh here's options below that huge pancake in the middle. Oh, it's not a button to open the Settings - it's a menu, with sub-menus? Oh, I see, some menus are check-boxes and some actually open the settings window. What? There are multiple separate settings windows for all kinds of things.. Couldn't all of them be in one settings window, as per usual? Oh, it would be too easy, intuitive and too simple to use, you say? OK, then... 22. I could go on like this for quite a while longer, but fuck it. There's more important things. During probably almost 2 years of using DrivePool and Scanner - I can confidently say, that 8 out 10 times I tried to control DP or Scanner on my server from my main rig - I could not. The trial on main rig expired ages ago. The drop-down menu selection to connect to server - there's no selection but the local rig. 8/10 times there's no server option. I can't connect and control the actual DP and Scanner that I use. So now I have 2 programs installed in my main rig for no fucking reason. Beautiful. 23. I have a shit load of drives. I want to keep some folder on a single drive. I go into settings > File Placement > and either Folders or Rules, does not matter. Then I need to un-check all my drives, but one. One by fucking one. Where are the "Check All" or "Un-Check All" buttons? Which is a standard pretty much everywhere nowadays. But here - you wish, just click away... Stop using that stupid fucking Telerik (I gather it's Telerik, from the looks of it). Take Caliburn.micro and MahApps and use listviews which support all keyboard shortcuts of selecting out of the box. Done. 24. Let's say I am doing the file placement setup. Why the hell do you have 2 separate tabs for Folder and Rules? If you set the rules in Folder tab, they show up in the rules tab, which may have some other wildcard based rules as well. Is it for sorting? Because, you know - you could put it all in one tab... 25. And as always with DrivePool - the drives list in File Placement rules is in one column - scroll away... How about WrapPanel, at least here? 26. Folder tab at least shows how much of that folder is on what drive. Now why it scans for files every single time you select the folder in the list - nobody knows, I bet. Every single fucking time - pick two folders and click away between them - every time same shit - calculating. Calculating fucking what? How many minutes it would take to code one fucking button like - Scan - which would scan the whole pool once and then keep that info until you done with the settings? Fuck me. Off course here's that fucking problem, that DP does not keep the list of files and where they are on which drives. And it cannot display it to me, when it need to... Ashamed of the fucking mess it has made, probably... 27. So, because spreading the files all over the place is simply fucking stupid, I want to actually manage my file placement. I have a list of folders on my pool on the left, I have a list of drives on the right. OK. I select one of the folders from the pool on the left, and... fucking calculating... and... I get another fucking list of drives down below. Because... reasons. Now, if I want to check where actually are my files, on what disks, compared to the settings - I need to dart my tired eyes back and forth between two lists. Now, both lists have different font sizes and font weight (maybe even font family, who the fuck knows at this point), which makes it so much harder to "quickly match up". Because... reasons. Why the fuck would you not use the same list of drives on the right side, that you already have? How much easier would be to actually see straight away, which drives have been checked on/off and which actually have files from that folder in them? Elementary, my dear Watson. Of course, because it's DrivePool we are talking about - I need to mention straight away, that when I say - show the status of the files in the drive list on the right - I mean really fucking show it! Not some ridiculously small progress bar, like in the main window, where you could never see anything, if you let's say have 10GB of files on a 10TB drive. That shit would be indiscernible. Well, in this case, maybe the size column would help to fix this, at least. You could make it that it would be easy to spot if drives have any files from selected folder - change the drive item background color, or name color, whatever. Big green dot, if the drive has any files from that folder whatsoever. Anything to make it intuitive and easy to use. 28. Can I at least sort that second drive list down below? Nope. Sorted only by size taken. Imagine 50+ drives and finding some drive by name to see if it's even on the fucking list! 29. Wanna see the folder size - need to switch between a list and a pie-chart (thosetiny buttons at the top of folders list). Would it be so hard to show folder size by the folder name in the list up top? And whats with that pie-chart selection? It shows me the same size 2 times. One with a round blob, one with a tiny line. Am I missing something here? 30. Filter (file/folder placement rules) also on disks. ie: I select a disk and see/set which folders can go onto that disk. Now, it is a pain to unselect every disk but one for every folder that I want to filter on. Especially, if I want it this way, I need to remember to go into settings and set filters on every new folder I create in the root of the pool in the future. This filtering on disks could be an additional (opposite) way to filter and set the rules. 31. Give us WebUI and let us control DP and others from the browser from wherever we want! It's not middle ages. And it's not that kind of program or the UI (especially as it is now) that would warrant you using WPF, and most importantly forcing me install 2 programs just to control them on another pc. That is whack. I have 1 license of all 3 programs - DrivePool, Scanner and CloudDrive. But both DrivePool and Scanner are running on my home server, which I actually want and do control from my main rig. Now, of course, I need to install both DrivePool and Scanner on my main rig, as-well. Just to control them on the server. Fuck that... 32. WPF would be warranted for a program, which needs a hugely fast update times. All of the web UIs I use (and they are numerous) are faster than this WPF GUI now. Seriously. The GUIs now for both DP and SCanner are fucking slow as snails. 33. Constant Not Responding when opening GUIs. This embarrassing, dude... Async. 34. Give us full featured (and I mean full featured - every single command and data point) json Web API and see the community blow your socks of with their imagination and awesome web UIs. You're a 1 dev team. Use your head and delegate. With unRAID waking from the development sleep with these ground-breaking new features and FreeNAS catching up to unraid lately in the last versions (even though it's still a mess, with coral, etc...), if DrivePool wants to stay alive and relevant - make an API and let people make your program "great again"... lol But seriously... not a joke, just do it. Please, don't suggest that there is that dpcmd thing. It's capabilities are weak. And the output format is crazy (why would you not make it easily consumable)? 35. Or if you hell bent on WPF - still, with full API, we can make a kick ass WPF UI. MahApps and Caliburn.Micro - both free and awesome - fuck that stupid Telerik. 36. Would be nice to have an option to see the log in the UI. With good filtering. Other 37. At least give us as simple text log files. So I could tail them when I wanna know whats going on in DrivePool real time. 38. Probably a bug. Setting the priority of the running balancer or duplication is not displayed properly in the UI, if using multiple UIs on multiple computers. And priority resets to normal, it seems, if you close/re-open the UI which is totally annoying. 39. The last stable version was, when exactly? All I know it was before 07-Jul-2014, judging by the betas numbers in the list. And it's even buggy enough, that I never used it, and started by using beta straight away. Not by my own whim, mind you, by Chris'es recommendation. I know, there was CloudDrive to release. But 2 years? That's how software dies. 40. I'm not sure, if this crap still not solved - but you cannot save your settings with the pool, or export/import them. At least that was the case, last I checked. That is seriously messed up. If this is solved already, sorry... my bad. But I do not care to look for it, as it is especially hard to look for something that may not exist. I tried finding the info on dpcmd for about 20 minutes, when I was writing about it - could not find it. Scanner 41. And... Scanner. I'm too tired already to go through and remember every single shit that's bugging me about scanner. But most of what's UI-wise and stuff - applies here too. Scanners UI is crap. Once again - only a single view with a single lit. Oh, and could the drives list items be even bigger, so I could see even less number of drives at the same time and would need to scroll more?.. 42. Allow setting concurrent scans per case. In my case every backplane has a separate link, and could use 4 links on the LSI HBA, 1 for each backplane. 43. Or better still - allow creating scanning groups. Most people probably use HBAs or RAID cards. Let us control the scanning settings, so we could achieve the optimum performance. Stop your fucking magic I-know-better and I do-it-auto-magically, which does not work properly, like most of the time. 44. UI does not collapse the list of drives. Actually it collapses the list and immediately expands it back again. wtf? 45. Yesterday I tried to open Scanner UI, and it took more than 2 minutes to open. It always takes long, way longer than it should (for what it is), but 2 minutes - fuck that shit. I'm asking you again, would you, please, gives us an API and let us make an awesome UI? Pretty fucking please... Because this shit is embarrassing (2+ minutes). Or at least Async that shit. Just for good measure - fuck Telerik and it's shit controls, again. Afterthoughts All, but the UI stuff, which could anyone argue is more of the preference kinda thing, IMHO is essential features, which methinks DrivePool must have, being the software that it is, as in managing your files on your file system. It needs to stop being magic that does not work perfectly, and instead - gives us control and choices. On the other hand, when it comes to UI, I stand by my opinions. Give me full featured API and I'll take care of my problems myself. That's all I ask Or again, wake up and let the community write your UI and balancers and what-have-you, for you... Phew... This one's got away from me This started as a reply to the pinned thread about pool groups, but I quickly realized, that the frustration started pouring a bit too much and I had to post it as a new thread. Sorry for all the swearing. It's because I love this company and the software. It is 100% true. I would love to be able to make a living as a one man software developer. And I have already said it in this post and in numerous others - imho, Alex is awesome, to have built these things alone. And I do not forget Chris, you, my friend are an exceptional person too. The job you 2 have done and keep doing is an inspiration. But from this love, and the want for your software to be better for you and us, your customers, this frustration had to be let out. Please, take it as a feature request and not an attack. I promise, I will cool off, return and edit all the fucks to something more cultured. Although, I don't want to take out all the emotion from the rant completely, and English is not my native tongue, so we'll see how that goes P.S. If, whoever accused me of loving to hear my own voice as a reason for my long post last time, gonna come back with the same shit - I most definitely do not. I hate it. It takes a shitload of time for me. Like I said - English is not my strong suite. And I make typos in like every second word, and need to keep editing endlessly. Lastly, I - maybe - write 1 rant like this a year. Not 1/year here - 1 a year total. Maybe less. And only with good reason. Check my freakin post count, dude. Peace.

So, I decided to try out the CloudDrive for the first time. It seems I have bought it too, when I bought the package, heh Anyway, I just started the Amazon Drive Unlimited trial. And only then I found this topic... So what do I do now? Do I use 1.0.0.631 build or the latest? Or am I f***ed, until you implement the new api?

@Chris thanks for answers. So I cleared the drive of unduplicated files (with the Drive Usage Limiter). It's been 4-5 days and there's no new warnings in the event viewer. Good sign? I guess I'll wait and see what happens This drive is one of 8 Seagate external drives I bought on Black Friday in 2011. The prices for drives have jumped sky-high back then, after the flood. I would've never bought external drives, but these went for ~$90, so I jumped on them in anticipation, that the prices will not go down quickly. Anyway, the first one of these died like 5 months ago and I thought, here it goes, now they probably gonna drop like dominoes. Sadly, I was right - 5 drives dead in 5 months. And it seems 6th is showing signs of giving up Well, I guess 4-5 years is kinda OK for these drives - ST3000DM001 have awful reviews everywhere and warranty was only 2 years.

Chris, as always, you're awesome, thanks for answers. OS: win 8.1 Pro x64 DrivePool: 2.2.0.659 Beta Scanner: 2.5.1.3062 As much as I can recall, nope. Take a look: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <configSections> <sectionGroup name="applicationSettings" type="System.Configuration.ApplicationSettingsGroup, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=REMOVED"> <section name="DrivePoolUI.MySettings" type="System.Configuration.ClientSettingsSection, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=REMOVED" requirePermission="false"/> </sectionGroup> </configSections> <system.diagnostics> <sources> <!-- This section defines the logging configuration for My.Application.Log --> <source name="DefaultSource" switchName="DefaultSwitch"> <listeners> <add name="FileLog"/> <!-- Uncomment the below section to write to the Application Event Log --> <!--<add name="EventLog"/>--> </listeners> </source> </sources> <switches> <add name="DefaultSwitch" value="Information"/> </switches> <sharedListeners> <add name="FileLog" type="Microsoft.VisualBasic.Logging.FileLogTraceListener, Microsoft.VisualBasic, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=REMOVED, processorArchitecture=MSIL" initializeData="FileLogWriter"/> <!-- Uncomment the below section and replace APPLICATION_NAME with the name of your application to write to the Application Event Log --> <!--<add name="EventLog" type="System.Diagnostics.EventLogTraceListener" initializeData="APPLICATION_NAME"/> --> </sharedListeners> </system.diagnostics> <startup><supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5.1"/></startup> <applicationSettings> <DrivePoolUI.MySettings> <setting name="UI_VerticalOnly" serializeAs="String"> <value>False</value> </setting> <setting name="UI_HorizontalLite" serializeAs="String"> <value>False</value> </setting> <setting name="UI_NoVersion" serializeAs="String"> <value>False</value> </setting> <setting name="Wss_AnimationFps" serializeAs="String"> <value>30</value> </setting> <setting name="Comm_ForceLocalTcp" serializeAs="String"> <value>False</value> </setting> <setting name="UI_TroubleshootingMode" serializeAs="String"> <value>False</value> </setting> <setting name="Comm_ForceLocalTcpPort" serializeAs="String"> <value>27525</value> </setting> </DrivePoolUI.MySettings> </applicationSettings> </configuration> Where and how should I send the logs? About chkdsk - is it for fixing the corrupted file system? Will running it "fix but also loose" any offending files? Already running beta. Waiting for new version of DP for ages... Presonaly, methinks Alex has buried himself with CloudDrive for good, while DrivePool very much needs some vital features and updates. Heh It is in the pool. But I very much understand the reason for you asking this anyway. Been there, seen that, many a time. Nope. Neither folder nor any files show up in the pool. I can only find/see them if I browse through the individual drive via NTFS mountpoint. If my GF wouldn't have wanted that movie, I most definetely would've missed this shit completely. No "hicups" while browsing the pool, no Scanner reports, that anything is wrong. File system - OK, S.M.A.R.T. - OK. Hence, I'm thinking, how long have this shit been going on? K, done. Where to send? Awesome. I totally forgot about checking the event log. And I think or rather hope I found the culprit. The event log is littered with these warnings: The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur in VolumeId: \\?\Volume{32abe257-2f68-4778-8927-670457764ce3}, DeviceName: \Device\HarddiskVolume41. (The I/O device reported an I/O error.)The volume id 32abe257-2f68-4778-8927-670457764ce3 is for the drive itself, and HarddiskVolume41 is actually the pool. So I guess drivepool tries to write something in on that drive and the drive errors out?Also it shows some of these: The IO operation at logical block address 0x172df9a0 for Disk 22 (PDO name: \Device\00000051) was retried. Questions: Is this the cause of these missing files? Why the hell there are no S.M.A.R.T. warnings then? Should I retire this drive or do you recon, it's still safe enough to keep it online for duplicated files only? Am I stupid even thinking about keeping using it? How do I go about trying to fix this drive? chkdsk and thats it? Or anything better out there? Should I clear the drive before hand? This drive is used by uTorrent. I have uTorrent seeding ~450 torrents, most of them have their files on the pool. This drive is one of 3, that are dedicated for uTorrent only. I mean, I remember reading that uTorrent and DrivePool does not play nice. Maybe that's the problem? Any good software to keep an eye on windows event log and report things like this automaticaly in the future?

Yesterday my gf asked me to get her a movie, so I downloaded it for her. Today she wanted to watch it, and asked why it's not there, did I forgot? I said, of course no, I did, it's there. She says no... I say, fuck yes, it is. She says no. I'm like, give me that...(the remote). I look through her Kodi library and... WTF? It's not there. The problem is, I KNOW I have it, I fucking got it yesterday. I use "Everything" to look for it, and there it is. I'm like WTF? The problem, that "Everything" does not work on the DrivePool pool, only on the mounted drives themselves. I go into the pool and what do you know - its not fucking there! So, the movie folder with the files are missing from the pool, but they actually are on one of the drives in the correct place. I have the pooled drives also mounted into folders, though I never use them, it actually helped this time to find out that's something is messed up. Here's a list of files for this movie: D:\Drives\b3s05\PoolPart.eb4558cc-3700-4add-95b0-09e7f9286bef\Movies\Good\The.Danish.Girl.2015.1080p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-SA89\clearart.png D:\Drives\b3s05\PoolPart.eb4558cc-3700-4add-95b0-09e7f9286bef\Movies\Good\The.Danish.Girl.2015.1080p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-SA89\logo.png D:\Drives\b3s05\PoolPart.eb4558cc-3700-4add-95b0-09e7f9286bef\Movies\Good\The.Danish.Girl.2015.1080p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-SA89\The.Danish.Girl.2015.1080p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-SA89.mkv D:\Drives\b3s05\PoolPart.eb4558cc-3700-4add-95b0-09e7f9286bef\Movies\Good\The.Danish.Girl.2015.1080p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-SA89\The.Danish.Girl.2015.1080p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-SA89.nfo D:\Drives\b3s05\PoolPart.eb4558cc-3700-4add-95b0-09e7f9286bef\Movies\Good\The.Danish.Girl.2015.1080p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-SA89\The.Danish.Girl.2015.1080p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-SA89-fanart.jpg D:\Drives\b3s05\PoolPart.eb4558cc-3700-4add-95b0-09e7f9286bef\Movies\Good\The.Danish.Girl.2015.1080p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-SA89\The.Danish.Girl.2015.1080p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-SA89-poster.jpg This never happened to me with DrivePool before, afaik. I searched the forum and all I could find was this thread: "Missing" files - General - Covecube Inc., where the guy was having the same problem, but there was no answer with a solution. Anyway, I did check the list of file system filters as per instructions here StableBit DrivePool Q2159701 - Covecube - Wiki: C:\Windows\system32>fltmc Filter Name Num Instances Altitude Frame ------------------------------ ------------- ------------ ----- WdFilter 49 328010 0 luafv 1 135000 0 npsvctrig 1 46000 0 FileInfo 49 45000 0 Wof 0 40700 0 It seems, there are more than those 2 (luafv and FileInfo) on my server, but i googled the others and they seem legit: WdFilter - Windows Defender Mini-Filter Driver - Windows 8 Service npsvctrig - Named pipe service trigger provider - Windows 10 Service Wof - Windows Overlay File System Filter Driver - Windows 8 Service So, the questions: How the fuck do I fix this? I mean, re-copying or moving the files to the pool manually is not a solution I am looking for. It may help for this one missing folder, that I found by accident, but what if there are more? What if this has been happening for days, weeks or months? How many "missing/hidden" duplicated files may there be on all the drives? Please don't tell me I will need to do this manually, as even a thought of doing this with 80TB of files is giving me a headache. Is this a bug? Why is this happening and how do I avoid it in the future? I did the file system logging thing, as per: StableBit DrivePool 2.x Log Collection - Covecube - Wiki. My logs are 228MB. What the hell is in those logs? And from how long ago? Why the hell do you need the whole folder? Why not the most recent log, from today, when this shit happened. Thanks in advance for any help.

So, DrivePool just gave me a really shitty Christmas present. I just noticed that Sonarr was giving errors. I checked the pool on my server and the TVShows folder was fucked. I was unable to copy files onto it or create folders. I always got this error (Directory Opus on the left, windows file explorer on the right): DrivePool showed nothing wrong, except "File distribution not optimal" and "Re-balance" option. I tried to re-balance. Which completed in like 10 seconds and did not help at all. Then I tried to "Re-measure". It finished in a minute or so, but the "Statistics are incomplete" pac-man icon did not went away, as it usually did, after re-measure completed. I thought...wtf... I checked Scanner and that one also showed nothing wrong - no file system failures either. At this point I already had a very bad feeling and decided to run a check with WhereIsIt. I use WhereIsIt to automatically scan the Pool every 6 hours and write results to a time-stamped file. I compared yesterdays 7pm file with todays 7pm file. Mo*******er... 8684 files missing from the TVShows folder alone! In that single folder there was 8.6 TB of files missing! Thats only one folder. I haven't checked others yet. That is not funny at all. The largest drives on the server are 6TB. So it's at least 2 or more drives have gone bad or what? Why Scanner shows no errors? Why DrivePool shows no errors? What the f*** happened, anyway? Please, tell me it's some drivepool bug and it lost it's mind, and that the files are actually not lost. Because if not - that is just plain ridiculous and the biggest file loss I have ever had. On f***in Christmas Eve, no less. And, once again, because DrivePool does not keep the files in the same folder together, but rather scatters them around on random drives, I've lost almost 9000 random episodes from pretty much all the shows, probably. Shit. The irony is, I bought a bunch of 6TB drives on BF, and now the second to last is finishing the full format. I was about to add them to the pool and set duplication probably tomorrow. Thanks in advance for any help. OS: win 8.1 x64 Scanner: 2.5.1.3062 DrivePool: 2.2.0.659 Beta

Yep, probably gonna need to use dedicated disks for utorrent. Arrgh, I added all the spinners to the pool, just yesterday I love having only SSDs and one huge pool of spinners in "This PC" Can I "un-seed" the drives from the pool? I mean I stop the service, move the files out of the pool into the drive's root (these files will not have duplication, of course) . Restart the service, re-measure, and then remove the drive from the pool. Which should be quick, as there's no files to move on removing the drive? Pitty though, I used to seed TBs upon TBs. Now if I have duplication, and still need another dedicated copy for ut seeding... f*** that. Anyway, now that you told me that there's such a thing like dpcmd.exe, I'm thinking, maybe I could write a windows service or a just a simple console app and use task scheduler to manage the duplication for me? - Scan the utorrent drives and hash-identify all seeding files. - Scan selected duplicated folders on the pool (like movies, tvshows, etc) and hash-identify the files. - Compare and find duplicated folders on the pool, that have all the files inside them with a 3rd copy on ut drives. - Unset duplication on those folders. - Save space. There is most definitely NO need for 3 copies of freakin movies and tv shows. Even 2x duplication is killing my spirit, when looking at all the space I'm loosing Would that be doable with dpcmd.exe? Would that create any sort of problems or performance hit on Drivepool? I mean, micro-managing the duplication this way, would create hundreds or maybe even thousands of individual duplication settings on folders... The positives would be: A separate copy of files for ut on dedicated drives. No need for tons of folder junctions, which I used before to point to the files in my library. Could seed even those torrents where people have f***ed up naming the files. There are always those "special" ones, that simply cannot comform to the naming rules, and need to be "different". Jeez, thats annoying. Could once again use hard links with utorrent and cross-seed those torrents, that have files renamed on one tracker but not on the other. Phleeease, tell me that's possible Oh, and btw, it would be nice, to have commands in dpcmd.exe to force re-measuring, re-balancing and duplication run. So it could be automated properly.

Thanks for an answer. Removed the letter, added mount point to folder, restarted, everything's OK.

Yep, Chris from the day before yesterday is better than Chris from yesterday, Such a blunder Scared me half to death for no good reason. You should be ashamed of yourself... But seriously, thanks for confirming about ut behavior. So, I should remember to stop the torrent, after it finished downloading and then resume it for seeding. Hoping, that ut would release the write-lock on the files. I gather ut should not re-lock the files with write-lock, just for seeding, but we'll see, I guess. Thanks again for all your answers, Chris.

Christopher, to be honest, I almost got scared another drive(s) dying... But then I was re-reading one of my older questions and found this: And of course, I had utorrent seeding 200+ torrents. I closed utorrent, added some more drives to the pool (by seeding the pool), and after the pool was up and running again - only ~12 GB of Other data. So, just to confirm - utorrent locks the files adn DP sees them as Other? I was thinking of seeding from the pool. Won't that be a constant problem, if the files are actualy Duplicated, but DP sees them as Other half of the time? Is that gonna be a constant needless balancing and reduplication/deduplication hell?

I'm trying to remove the drive letter from the drive and gives me this error: And these are the files that are locking the drive: I tried restarting the server, but it did not help. This drive is in the pool, so I want it without a letter and mounted to a folder. Any ideas how to fix this?

Just an update: Reshuffled the drives in the backplanes. 17 drives have moved or switched places. Drivepool remeasured after restart and everything is peachy. Scanner also recognized all the drives and the looking at the last scan history for al the drives, it seems they have been identified correctly, as they all have the scan history. Awesome. Now all I need is for the drives to stop dying

I reshuffled the drives in my backplanes, and after restarting the server and after DrivePool remeasured the pool the "other" size has decreased from considerably: from 2.58TB to 1.92TB. This is still too much though, it should be something like 1.7TB. Why the size decreased - no idea, I tried remeasuring like 5 times before and it did not change. Now it did, though still to big. I hate not knowing what the hell is going on Ok, here's the screens of PoolPart on one of the disks, that should not have any other data, but has 51.6 GB. As you can see, it's clearly not 51.6 GB difference It would be very helpful if DrivePool had a view, where you could clearly see a list of files on the drive and the type of the files, like: unduplicated, duplicated, other... Maybe a feature for the future? Seriously though, what are those hundreds of GBs, that DP considers as Other? I mean, these sizes are not trivial...

Thanks for answers, Christopher. Nope, remeasuring does not help. Also I do not use any shadowcopy, snapshots, deduplication or somesuch. Checked with windirstat and here's an example for one of the drives: there should be pretty much NO other data, but instead there is 284GB, which is a huge amount, huh...

Christopher, thank you for answers. Very happy to hear, that I can safely re-shuffle the drives. Yep, I have my drives mounted to the folders on one of the SSDs (D:\Drives\...). And thanks a lot for reminding me to use the case and bay names in the disk settings in the Scanner. That'll make this way easier. Awesome. Thanks again.

As the title says, Drivepool shows ~1TB too much of Other files. I have files on only 1 drive outside of the pool. The size of those files is ~1.5 TB. But Drivepool shows there is 2.5TB of Other data. And I can see Other data on pretty much every disk in the DP UI, which varies from ~200MB to ~250GB. I've read FAQ - Unduplicated vs Duplicated vs Other vs Unusable - Nuts & Bolts - Covecube Inc., and I understand there should be some additional Other data, but a Terabyte? This feels way too much. Is this normal or is this a bug? Windows 8.1 Drivepool 2.2.0.651 beta Pool size: 76.4TB, Unduplicated: 60.2TB, Duplicated: 2.94TB, Other 2.58TB

So I got bored waiting, and used the remove button, while the loop was in the "right position", ie: when the drive was emptied. And removed the drive from the pool. Though the questions remain, what the hell was happening and why? Edit: I removed the offending drive and disabled Drive Usage Limiter balancer. I do not like having too little free space on the drive, and after this stupid looping drive08 has only 96GB of free space left. Even though Prevent Drive Overfill balancer should not allow this. So I launch re-measure to try and re-balance to move files of drive08. Re-measuring took almost 15 minutes for some reason, while before it always took probably less than a minute. Why the re-measuring was taking so long now and how do I trigger the balancing to move some files off the drive08?

Couple of days ago Scanner notified about another drive with SMART warnings. Reallocated Sectors Count was 318. I did not have any duplication set on that pool at that time. The problematic disk contained all my F1 races, which would be a disaster to loose, so I decided to play it safe and remove the drive. As per instructions here StableBit Manual, If I use the drive remove option, the pool goes into read-only mode until all the files are moved from the drive, which I did not want. So I decided to use the Drive Usage Limiter balancer to clear the drive ( I don't use it and have it disabled usually). Step 1. Before hand I decided to play safe and duplicate the F1 folder residing on that drive. So I set 2x duplication on that folder ant let it run. It took a very long time (~12 hours or so) to duplicate ~1.5TB of data. I mean compared to simply copying it someplace else. Further more, duplication failed with warnings. Some files failed to duplicate with The request could not be performed because of an I/O error. The weird and annoying thing is, that scanner showed no damage. I simply copied the failed files from the pool to another disk. Ran reduplication again, and again warnings and failed files with the same I/O errors. Again I simply copied the failed files from the pool. Another annoying thing: Duplication Warnings window shows only so many files (like 9-10) that have failed, not all of them, why oh why? I had to rerun duplication and copy failed files (9-10 files at a time, only those shown in the error messages window) like 5-6 times. Why not show list off all failed files? Or better even give an option to save a list to text file? Or give us an easy way to access a log? Notice, how DP failed duplicating (reading?) the files on the drive multiple times, and at the same time, I copied them of the pool using Directory Opus without no problems. No problems at all, like nothing happened. Question then, why the hell DP was failing on duplicating those files with I/O errors? Anyway, when I first saw I/O errors I panicked the files were lost, but when I managed to copy them out and sort this shit out, I was happy and moved on. Step 2. I enabled the Drive Usage Limiter balancer and uncheked both checkboxes for duplicated and unduplicated files from the offending disk (only from this single disk, all others have both checked). I waited for DP to move files out, nothing happened for a long time. I search the forums, and tweaked the global balancer settings: unchecked hours limit and set ratio too 100%. Then DP finally started the balancing. So now it's been about ~20 hours or so, and it's still not finished. The drive had ~1.6TB on it. For the last 3 hours or so it is stuck in the crazy loop: Lets call the drive to be cleared drive11. There are 31 drives in the pool atm. What Drivepool is doing for the last 3 hours or more, is actually moving the last ~100GB from drive11 to another drive (let's call it drive08) and back again. Seriously, I noticed it and was like wtf? But now I'm letting it run and see what happens. Even more weird is, that from all the other 30 drives on the pool, that drive08 is the most full. It has the least amount of free space left. Too little, by my settings (check screens below), but when the balancing which moved files from drive11 to drive08 finishes, drive08 has only ~90GBs of free space left! There are many other drives in the pool with >500, >600 GBs of free space left. So all Drivepool does now, is move the files from drive11 to drive08, finally emptying the drive11, which I want... Then it sits for a minute, and starts re-balancing again and them moves ~100GB of files back from drive08 to drive11, which has been set as to not accept any files, neither duplicated nor unduplicated. But dp it seems, says "f*** that", let's put some back, why not. And after a minute it starts again, and empties drive11 again, but where does it copy the files - of course, drive 08! Back and forth, again and again. What is happening? What's with the crazy endless loop? Why DP copies files to drive08, when settings specifically say, not to fill beyond 170GB of free space in the Prevent Drive Overfill balancer? Why is this happening? And how do I stop it and fix it? My system and settings: Windows 8.1 DrivePool 2.2.0.651 Beta If any more info needed, let me know. I have NO forder or file placement rules set at all. Balacer settings: Thanks in advance for any help.

Yes Yes Yes. Drive groups or duplication groups. This is a must, imho.

Thanks, Slayer. I guess I'll try it out and see what happens. I hope scanner can recognize that it is the same drives as before, just different slots.

So I had extremely bad luck the past couple of months - 6 drives died in as many as 8 weeks. I have bought 6 new drives and gonna add them to the pool. But what I would also like to do, is to move or swap places of some of the already existing drives. I mean I have 4 backplanes with 16 drive slots each connected to my sever (4x Rackable SE3016 connected via 4x SAS SFF-8088 cables to LSI 9201-16e HBA). Basically, I want to "rearrange" the drives in the backplanes, instead of putting the new drives in the "holes" where the dead drives were, I would reshuffle the drives and connect the new drives in the same backplane. It's probably a little bit OCD, but I like the drives to be "sorted", then it's easier to keep track of all of them. It gets confusing sometimes when you got a shitload of drives. I figured I'd ask before doing. I use Stablebit's both Scanner and Drivepool. I have some folders duplicated (2x). Will there be problems if I'll shuffle the drives around in the backplanes? I mean will Drivepool and Scanner be ok with this? Will Drivepool see and restore the pool auto-magically? Will Scanner have problems recognizing and retaining the scanned status if the drives have moved? I mean Scanner just re-scanned most of the drives this week. Should I do it in 2 stages? I mean, 1st reshuffle the old drives, start windows and let the DP and Scanner do it's thing. And only then shutdown and connect the new drives? To minimize confusion, so to speak... Thanks in advance for any help.

Basically, what I used to do with uTorrent before trying drivepool: This applies only to folder, not single file downloads. I had one folder somewhere, let's call it "Torrent_Junctions". In that folder I created junctions to various other folders on various drives in my server. This way, it did not matter, where the downloaded files finally reside, I can even move them from place to place, I can easily rename the folder where files are located, and all I need to do is replace the junction in the "Torrent_Junctions" folder. And all this time uTorrent is able to seed, where ever these files are. Anyway, I found this was the easiest way to deal with this. Example: I have a folder, eg: D:\Torrent_Junctions uTorrent finishes a download, eg: D:\Torrent_Junctions\The.Best.Series.Evah.S01.720p.Bluray.x264-ZeGroup Stop the torrent in uTorrent. Move the files to, eg: K:\TVShows\The.Best.Series.Evah\Season01 Create junction from K:\TVShows\The.Best.Series.Evah\Season01 to D:\Torrent_Junctions\The.Best.Series.Evah.S01.720p.Bluray.x264-ZeGroup Resume the torrent in uTorrent. Voila. uTorrent just keeps happily seeding. I've read on the forums, that folder junctions are supported by the DrivePool. Some questions: Is it OK to keep doing this, but making junctions outside the pool, that point to the folders that are on the pool? eg: disk D is not in the pool, and the junction: D:\Torrent_Junctions\Something that points to P:\DrivePool\Whatever\SomeFolderOnThePool. Will that be alright with drivepool? No funky business? How about uTorrent locking folders and files, if seeding at the time, when drivepool wants to balance, etc? Will that create constant problems? Will this work if using duplication? I mean, the junction points to the folder on the pool, which is duplicated. As I understand uTorrent should be oblivious about duplication, that's the magic that is drivepool, isin't it? Would it be considerably "safer" to point uTorrent straight to the folder on the pool, instead of using junctions? Or should I better off playing safe and not pointing uTorrent to anything on the pool at all? I mean to avoid many folders and files being locked by uTorrent, when drivepool needs to rebalance and move stuff around?

A couple of days ago, I tried DrivePool and Scanner for the second time. About a year ago, scanner was not able to read SMART from my HBA and enclosures, so that was a bust and I has trouble with a bug in a release version of drivepool with saving settings while having multiple pools. So I decided no to... I have never used any raid or parity solution before to protect my data. I tried unRaid from time to time years ago, did not like it. Recently I tried tRAID for the 3rd time and did not like it too, again. Then I looked into Snapraid + DrivePool and decided, nah. I was always categorically against backup solution because of cost, but finally, I decided - enough. Drivepool and duplication, let's try this out. After a couple of days, I have some questions: 1. How safe is to have 2x duplication? With Scanner running safety. I mean, over the past 10 years I've been reading again and again about all kinds of ways of data protection, from hardware raids to parity, to zfs, etc... 99% of the time you always come to the same warning - raid/parity/etc is not safety - backup is. Hence the question. Is Scanner + DrivePool's 2x duplication a way to feel sure that I won't loose data, the next time I'm gonna loose a drive? 2. Is drivepool's 2x duplication more secure (because of scanner) or less secure (bugs, whatever), than running 2 pools and syncing between them? 3. I was copying TBs of data to the pool from unpooled drives and noticed problems with small files. While copying big folders with lots of tiny files inside, like images, mp3 or even smaller, the speed was climbing up to impossible 300MB/s-400MB/s and then suddenly stopping and hanging for sometimes even a couple of minutes. Then again - copying resumes, speed climbs fast to impossible (I was copying from a single spinner, hence speed should be max ~100MB) and then hangs again. Here's the possible reasons, that come to mind: a) I am running StableBit.DrivePool_2.2.0.639_x64_BETA. I looked through forums extensively, to find which beta is considered "stable", iirc this was said to be. But still, it's beta... b.) I was copying from a drive with SMART sector warnings. c) I am using Directory Opus for all my file management, not the windows Explorer. Dopus is the best thing after sliced bread, imho. I hope there is no problems using dopus and drivepool together. If it's between dopus and drivepool - dopus hands down, sorry. It's too powerful and time saving for me to get back to using Explorer. d) Maybe it's some settings I should disable/enable to avoid this behavior? e) Edit #1. Very important! Similar thing happens with big files as well. I was copying large files from the pool to outside the pool. Again - this time from the pool to outside. The files were ~1.5GB in size. For the first 5-10 minutes Dopus was copying at about normal rate ~100MB+/s, but it was stoping and completely hanging every 5-10 seconds or so. I mean, it showed "not responding" when the copying hanged, then it resumed again, like nothing happened. And again and again, for ~10 minutes. Then it normalized and did not stop/hang anymore, but the copying speed dropped to about half of the normal ~50MB/s. Basically, the copying was done from WD Red 3TB to Hitachi 4TB drive, and the only other activity on any of them was Kodi was streaming an episode from WD Red (source) drive, which is insignificant, imho... Both drives are quite new and aOK. Is this a normal drivepool behavior? Coz it does not look good and is annoying. Hanging the whole Dopus is enough by itself. But having only half the speed of drives while reading from the pool? Not good at all. I hope it's something on my system, that I can fix, please let me know. Edit #2. 15 minutes later. Copying from the same place to the same place (from the pool, which happens to be same WD 3TB drive to the same Hitachi 4TB) and everything looks ok. Full speed ~100MB+/s and no stops and hangs. Edit #3. Nah, after a cuple of minutes, speed drops to about half and stays there, again. WTF is going on? Should I stop using Beta version of drivepool or is it Dopus (it shouldn't be), or this something else? 4. I was considering adding an SSD to the pool and using file placement rules to put all metadata for my movies and tv shows on it. I mean using filters like "*.jpg", "*.nfo", etc. I was thinking, the media files are big, and they pretty much never change, but meta is small and gets regularly updated, so that would possibly help with defragmentation. Having meta files separated onto SSD, would it be a better? Or possibly worse, as it would most definitely create an enormous amount of additional "merging work" for the pooling driver? 5. Let's say I put all meta onto SSD with file placement filters. If I enable duplication, that probably means I need 2 SSDs to be able to duplicate the meta and keep the SSD bonuses while using the meta files in the pool? 6. Today arrived my order of new 6TB drives. My first 6TBs ever. I was wondering, how much free space should I leave on these so not to get NTFS in trouble? I have 4TB, 3TB & 2TB drives in the pool atm. The setting that I use now is set to leave 200GB of free space. Would 200GB be enough for 6TB drive. Or, basically, the age old question: how much free space to leave on the drives? Should I leave the same amount in GBs on all size drives, or should I set the option to leave eg: 5%? I would not like to leave 10%-15%, like some people say, because I'd hate to loose that much space. Especially considering how much space is already lost on duplication. Jeez. 7. There are 2 balancers that have an option to set free space to be left on the drives: Drive Usage Limiter, which only has percent setting. I have this balancer disabled atm. Prevent Drive Overfill, which I have set to: try not to fill above: 90% or 170GB and Empty to 85% or 200GB. From the info describing how it works, I gather my settings ignore percent and use 170GB and 200GB settings. Am I correct? 8. If I want to enable Drive Usage Limiter, but keep size based free space setting, I should move Prevent Drive Overfill to be above Drive Usage Limiter, right? 9. Long story short: I have 4 "groups" of drives: oldest: 10+ a mix of old 2TB drives older: 8x Seagate 3TB drives newer: 16x WD Red 3TB drives brand new: 6x WD Red 6TB drives What I would like to achieve is to "control" how the duplication woks. I would like to set "drive groups" of drives: a) a group that holds non-duplicated files. That's the newest drives (my thinking, the newer the drives, the less chance to fail). That should be easy enough, I guess: just use Drive Usage Limiter and uncheck Duplicated for those drives? b.) now this second scenario I gather is not possible atm, please confirm. I would like to set 2 groups for duplication: one group of newer drives for "primary copy" and second group for "duplicates". This way I could be sure, that all files have one copy on newer drives. As it stands atm, I guess drivepool would duplicate files onto random drives, hence I would have files with both copies on newer drives and with both copies on oldies...? c) I would very much like to ask for this feature to set drive groups be added to drivepool in the future in a form of balancer, most probably. From what I gather how drivepool works, that should not be difficult, methinks. Additionally, you could enable setting groups as "primary" and "copies". This would have additional positive effect: you could disable real-time duplication and would always use "primary" group of newer, faster drives in real-time everyday file management, and files would duplicate to slower drives in the background... 10. I would like to ask for a feature in the drivepool's UI to display additional "free space" statistic. What I mean, is maybe it's me, still not used to pooled drives, but it's kinda confusing how much free space I really have in the pool. My pool shows 17.6 TB of free space, but considering that I have 32 drives in the pool atm, all keeping 200GB of free space , I always need to remember and do the math to realize, that actually I have FreeSpace - NumberOfDrives*200GB = RealFreeSpace. That's 6.4 TB in my case atm. But as I'm gonna constantly add drives and sometimes take some out, this number will constantly change and I'll constantly need to do the math. I propose additional pie chart section, something like "Reserved Free Space" and then drivepool could show Free Space as in now (full) and additionally, calculated real free space left from FreeSpace-Files-ReservedFreeSpace=HowMuchSpaceIhaveLeftOnThePoolForRealz 11. I've read someplace on the forums, that exporting and importing of drivepool settings is coming. Very nice to hear, as this feature imho should be in every software, period. Also, why not save pool settings on the pool drives themselves? Duplicate for safety. Then, after windows reinstall, or after moving to a new machine, just pop-in the drives, and pool spins up with all the settings... I was really surprised when I first realized that it wasn't this way already. I mean it as a compliment, actually. DrivePool and Scanner just have this quality feel and a whiff of some very good thinking and work put into in to it. Hence, I'm seriously baffled about annoying inability to quickly get away with the settings. Oh, and CloudDrive? Seriously? One programmer doing this? All I can say - F**k you, Bitcasa. Anyone who knows what bitcasa was?is?whocares..., knows what I mean. F**k you, Bitcasa, eat your heart out...