Elijah_Baley

This is mainly an informational post. This is concerning Windows 10. I have 13 drives pooled and i have every power management function set so as to not allow Windows to control power or in any way shut down the drives or anything else. I do not allow anything on my server to sleep either. I received a security update from Windows about 5 days ago. After the update I began daily to receive notices that my drives were disconnected. Shortly after any of those notices (within 2 minutes) I received a notice that all drives have been reconnected. There was never any errors resulting from whatever triggered the notices. I decided to check and I found that one of my USB controllers had its power control status changed. I changed it back to not allowing Windows to control its power and I have not received any notices since. I do not know for sure but I am 99% sure that the Windows update toggled that one controller's power control status to allow windows to turn it off when not being used. I cannot be 100% sure that I have had it always turned off but, until the update, I received none of the notices I started receiving after the update. I suggest, if anyone starts receiving weird notices about several drives becoming lost from the pool, that you check the power management status of your drives. Sometimes Windows updates are just not able to resist changing things. They also introduce gremlins. You just have to be careful to not feed them after midnight and under no circumstances should you get an infested computer wet.

A final, I hope, follow-up to this. I have fixed the problems by simply going to the OS level and going to each drive and making "Everyone" the owner, with full rights, to each of the PoolPart... directories on the drives. That seems to have cleared everything up and the duplicating functioning is restored. I probably made this more trouble than it needed to be but I plead age and poor health that influenced my decisions to the more complicated side. I lost a few files but at least i did not need to rebuild my entire pool. I wish there was a tool available that will fix this kind of issue automagically but doing it manually is not too bad as long as the correct choice is made early on. Unfortunately some of my early decisions led me down the wrong path so it took me several times longer than it should have. Again, I plead old brain syndrome.

Folks, thank all for the ideas. I am not neglecting them but I have some health issues that make it very hard for me to do much of anything for a while. I will try the more promising ones as my health permits but it will take some time. From operation and the lack of errors during writing/reading it seems that I am in no danger except duplication won't work. I can live with that for a while. Keep the ideas coming and, maybe, I can get this mess fixed and report back which tools worked for me. I am making one pass through my pool where I remove a drive from the pool, run full diagnosis and file system diagnosis on that drive then I re-add it back to the pool. When completed that will assure that there are no underlying drive problems and I can proceed from there. Thanks to all who tried to help this old man.

Well StableBit did get in touch wtih me and we tried several things and they answered a bunch of my questions. However the problem is still there but I have narrowed it down to some kind of permission/ownership issue as i get errors on some files when I try to access then. The error DrivePool shows is "Duplication inconsistent" but when I try to recheck duplication it simply returns to the same error after much less than one second. I try some things virtually every day but it takes time and my health is not good (I am an old guy) so I can only do a limited amount each day. If anyone has ideas that might allow me to fix my pool I will be grateful but I cannot test thoroughly or make large changes most days. StableBit believes that it is something with the underlying drives but, right now, I cannot take the time to test each one outside the pool as that takes time I do not, presently, have. I hope that running the pool as I am right now with no duplication working will not cause any additional problems but I have little choice. Thanks.

I have a pool of 13 drives and I had an unexpected nearby lightening strike. I have surge protection and nothing seems damaged but my Drivepool drive is now reporting a bad boot sector and that seems to be preventing all duplication actions. several files/folders lost their rights/owners and I tried to fix all the errors I found using "Takedown" and the followups and all the problem files/directories i found became accessible after i fixed them but i seem to not be able to do that for the boot sector and I may have missed a few files/folders. My dirvepool drive is fully accessible but I cannot get any duplication to run on it. I had duplication enabled but i have gone in and disabled it every where but "metadata" and the option does not exist for that one object. it seems that even though the duplication is now turned off nothing has changed. I tried running chkdsk /f on the pool and I get an error saying that the boot sector is invalid/bad/corrupted. The operation of the pool seems fine and I can add/delete/modify files just fine but Drivepool reports problems with duplication and it will not run the check duplication feature at all. I click the little down error and it acts like it is going to start but it just returns to the main screen with the progress bar and a report of "Duplication inconsistent. I want to fix this someway but I was wondering something: All my drives are fine. I wonder if I can somehow force the pool to be recreated without losing the data in the poolpart... directories and i wonder, if i did that, would the data be retained. I am even willing to manually move data from one poolpart folder to another if that is what is required. Also i would like detailed instructions but i am quite willing to work with some general directions. I downloaded and ran Wss.Troubleshoot_1.0.0.165.exe and I managed to get some info but it never actually seemed to do anything other than report. I just want the DrivePool drive to operate as it did and IREALLY do not want to lose any data. I tried to ask a question about this last week and received a response and did as suggested but no improvement. I posted back and reported that nothing worked but I have received no further messages. The request is: https://stablebit.com/Contact/1194079 I need to know a few things as well: Is there any danger to using the drive as it is? One more thing: I am quite computer literate but i am also elderly and, sometimes, I have problems organizing, my actions and that is why I would like some detailed help. Of all the questions I have the most pressing one is the one about any dangers. I have a lot of very hard to duplicate data in the pool and i know i can copy it out is needed but I do not want to lose any of it so knowledge about the dangers would be much appreciated.

I have a rather large pool with 2X duplication on a large part of it and I have one drive in the pool that I want to be sure that one copy of the duplicated files from a particular folder is always stored on that physical drive. That is I have these drives in the pool: (paired down from reality for brevity) D: E: F: G: H: and the pool is mapped to X: Under X I have folders: F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 and 2X duplication is on for all those folders. I want to be sure that at least one copy of all the files and folders from F1 are stored on H: I do not care what the distribution of the other folders are and I do not care where the second copy of the files from F1 reside. I think what I want to do is possible but for the life of me I cannot seem to reason it out in such a way that I am sure that what I want is possible. When files are initially written into F1 I do not much care where the first copy gets stored as long as, when duplication is complete, one copy is stored on H: in its PoolPart folder. The reason I need this is complex but suffice to say that I have a program that REALLY does not reliably read from the pool but does read fine from a physical disk. There is another solution where I keep the directory outside the pool but that would complicate other things. I am hoping there is something in the balancing/file placement rules or settings that would allow me to do as I want. Note: F1 is never more than about 10% of the size of H: and its files are dynamic but, as I said, it does not matter where the first copy gets placed as long as one copy ends up on H: after duplication completes. Also currently the pool is only about 75% full. Thanks for any and all help and/or ideas.

You can share the CloudDrive and then access it from anywhere on the network. That seems to work for me. Of course that does not allow streaming outside of the Network but you can use Plex to accomplish that.

Thank you, That seems to have fixed the problem. The reset did not cause any problems as I do not use any of the fancy options, I just let DrivePool handle most setting as the defaults are good enough for most everything I do.

A few days ago I had a drive crash. It was a total failure and I was only able to remove the drive, which I did using the "remove" function. DrivePool crashed for some reason during the removal but when I rebooted the computer the remaining drives were still in the pool and working correctly and the pool was the correct size and there was, and is, no mention of the failed drive anywhere I can find in DrivePool. However every time I reboot the computer or simply stop and restart DrivePool an email is generated that says: ============= Seagate Expansion Desk USB Device (S/N: "sn replaced") - 4.55 TB (Pool: ?)You are receiving this message because you have set up email notifications to be sent to this address from StableBit DrivePool. ============== That is the SN of the failed drive but it has been removed from the pool and it is no longer attached to the computer. (It is actually on its way back to Seagate as it was well under warranty.) What I would like to know how to is to tell DrivePool that the drive is really gone so I do not receive that email. Note: The question mark where normally there would be a Pool number in the email and also that on its screen DrivePool does not actually show the drive at all. Thanks for any help.

After reading the reply and the links provided it seems that the CloudDrive is not what I want for my backup functionality within my DrivePool setup. However I like the way the CloudDrive application uses my Unlimited Amazon Cloud storage. I will run an Xcopy routine (that copies only new files) as part of my nightly maintenance routine. That will provide a good backup and the only thing I loose is the immediate availability that using DrivePool's duplication feature provides. I am pretty sure that I will buy CloudDrive after my free trial ends but it is unfortunate that it seems that the combo of DrivePool and CloudDrive cannot do what I want as it does not seem that it is possible to control where the actual streaming comes from and DrivePool complains dramatically if it is linked to CloudDrive and the Internet connection goes down. This is not a show stopper for using the products but it does force a rethinking of how to best use them.

I read the thread at: http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/1231-how-do-i-keep-duplicated-data-on-the-pool-but-other-copies-anywhere-else/ That may have the answer that I want but I appear to be too dense to understand it. What I want is for several of my pooled directories to be duplicated on my cloud drive and not be duplicated anywhere else. I have a rule for \movies (does it need a drive letter?) that has only the cloud drive selected. Also I have, under Drive usage limiter, deselected "unduplicated" for the cloud drive but all the other drives have both boxes selected. Is this enough to assure that the usage is what I want? Again, to be clear, I want the cloud drive to only contain duplicates and I want the actual streaming to come from one of my local drives and I want no duplication on any of my local drives. To put it another way I want my pool to behave as if the local drives are the primary drive and the cloud drive is the backup only. I apologize if this is answered effectively elsewhere and therefore wasting someone's time but I could not find and understand a definitive answer if it exists.

I have my new DrivePool setup to duplicate most of the data I have that I consider important and the duplication process seems to be progressing fine. The process is going pretty slowly but there is over 14 TB of data involved so taking a while is to be expected. What I want to know is if there is any way to find where, in the pool, duplicates are stored for each file and/or which files have actually been duplicated? I know I should trust the software but I am of the school that says "trust" but "verify" so I would just like to know when/if certain files have been duplicated in the process. Right now I only have space, with about 20% extra, for 2X duplication but I hope to, over the next few months, add sufficient storage to go to 3x and maybe then I will feel safe. DrivePool is working well and has proved to be easy to maintain and add or change storage so it really looks like it will be my solution. I have noticed that access to files in the pool seem to be a little slower BUT the files I am storing are almost all audio and video files and speed of access is not a primary concern for those. If I can just get over my small concerns about the duplicating and verifying then I can worry a lot less than before getting DrivePool. Oh, one more question that I think I know the answer to: Is it correct that DrivePool will assure that duplicate files are not stored on the same physical drive. That is if File1.MKV is stored on physical drive 1 then its duplicate will be stored on a different drive in the pool? Sorry if those questions are answered in the documentation but I could not be sure. It seems like much of the documentation was written by a programmer. BTW: I was a programmer for over 30 years starting back when the medium was paper tape and/or punch cards. Hence my documentation read the same way.