ThatMouse

Is there some advantage to having 2 or more drive pools across the same 4 HDD, or is it best to just one 1 giant pool? Kind of a two part question, as I'm wondering in the sense of what will be easier when one drive fails (or other issues arise)? I would be duplicating some folders only like family photos, but not all my movies and TV shows. I have an online back-up and a local. Local would be easy to restore, but how exactly does one even restore from an online back-up without pulling down all 4 HDD worth of data?

Ok this sounds like good news! So my only concern is if CrashPlan will see files as deleted when drives fail, and I'd need to test if it's any more difficult to select and restore deleted files. CrashPlan keeps deleted files backed-up as long as you do not remove the folders from the backup plan in CrashPlan's UI. I've had to restore super important photos and videos using CrashPlan and it's hairy when one wrong click will delete them all!

-- Updated for clarity -- Are you saying CrashPlan will not back-up and restore a virtual drive? I will need to move my 6TB+ of files into the virtual drive in the same folder structure (eg Movies, Photos) and I will expect CrashPlan to scan through those without re-uploading them. Also, restoring sounds like another issue. When a drive fails, I know "Photos" and "Movies" are gone and need to restore those folders. But here it sounds like random files just go missing and you have no way to know which ones need a Restore, and the only option would be to restore everything which would take a year.

I'm working on a 12TB+ NAS build which will be a Skylake system on Windows 10. A lot of it being Bluray rips. My thoughts are RAID would be far too complex for my needs and a Linux/ZFS system would limit what software I could run for doing backups and other things like trans-coding video. Allyn Malventano from pcper mentioned he was using DrivePool, and I'm assuming the Scanner too. This combo seems to be exactly all I need. Simple enough to where I can always just add a drive or pull a drive off and get the files off if things go wrong. This this right for NAS?