Christopher (Drashna)

Sorry for the delay in getting to you! Could you open a ticket at https://stablebit.com/Contact if you haven't already?

To clarify, you only need a license on the systems that you want full functionality on. If you ONLY want remote access to another system, you don't need a license and you don't even need to activate the trial.

If you have data on Google Drive that you want on the drives, then you'll need to download that data to the drives. And if you're pooling the drives, if you decide you only want one drive, you'd want to remove that disk from the pool. This will move all of the data off of the disk you remove. This will take a while to complete depending on how fast your connection is, how fast data can be downloaded, how large the cache drive is, and how much data is being moved.

Correct. StableBit DrivePool tracks the drive by Volume ID, not by the drive letter. And as long as the NTFS volumes on the disk show up, then StableBit DrivePool will continue to be able to use it. The drive will show up "missing" in this case, and you'll have to remove the missing disk to get the pool to be writable again. Additionally, if you reconnect the disk later, it will re-add the disk to the pool. And shamelessly, if you have StableBit Scanner installed too, if it detects issues, it will cause StableBit DrivePool to evacuate the contents of the disk. The best way is to remove the disk from the pool, using the UI. This will make sure that everything is handled correctly. https://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=Removing a Drive from the Pool It should, but that's tricky. Both in doing and answering. It *should* be fine, but if not: https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_F1655 This works for merging pools, or re-pooling a drive. Duplication settings are stored on the pool itself, so that will go with the pool, no matter what. But the balancing settings are stored on the system locally and cannot be copied over. But, yes, DrivePool will detect the poolpart folders and rebuild the pool with the available disks. Absolutely! We recommend using Disk Management, since it's built in. And the same goes for the pooled drives, too. Yeah, that should absolutely work. Some features, such as USN Journaling support are not present on the pool, though. Not really. Multithreaded copies may benefit, but it's HIGHLY situation. It does have a popup on the first pool creation. But yeah. However implementing it in a safe and non-destructive way isn't easy. But it is something that we may add in the future.

It is. However, you should be able to set the "override" value for "CloudFsDisk_IsDriveRemovable" to "false", and it may fixe the issue. But the drive will no longer be treated as a removable drive. https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_CloudDrive_Advanced_Settings

Tweaking the I/O Performance options may help too. https://stablebit.com/Support/CloudDrive/Manual?Section=I/O Performance

Yes, it should. It creates a virtual drive, that the data is stored on, and should work like a normal disk.

Specifically: https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_F1655

I'll bring this up. But probably won't happen until after StableBit Cloud has a beta release.

It sounds like Windows Search isn't indexing the drive. You may need to change the configuration for it to properly search the pool. https://www.howtogeek.com/272158/how-to-choose-which-files-windows-search-indexes-on-your-pc/

This is an incorrect assumption, and probably the cause of most misunderstandings. StableBit CloudDrive does not show you what is on the provider. Instead, it creates a virtual drive, breaks that up into blocks/chunks, and then stores those chunks on the provider in question.

Nope, definitely not dead! But if it's urgent, or basically, it's the best way, direct any support queries to https://stablebit.com/Contact

The main reasons that folder would be read only is if the pool has a missing disk, or that there is an issue with the licensing. If neither are the case, let me know.

It sounds like these two issues are unrelated. However, if the disk in question also seems to be causing weird behavior in general, it may be simplest to replace it. As for the evacuation, I'm not sure. It is possible that StableBit Scanner detected unreadable sectors, as that would trigger this behavior. As for the "building bucket lists", this is a pre-execution task for balancing. It can take a while, as it's basically determining where to move all of the files. Also, do you have any balancer plugins installed on the system?

Since I don't see it in any of the images, do you have any disks in the pool that are completely full? If so, this can cause StableBit DrivePool to report that it has no free space, since it actually pulls that information from the underlying disks.

This is a SAS drive, and doesn't report SMART. It uses a different method for reporting drive health (SAS information), which isn't implemented in StableBit Scanner. Additionally, if the drives are in a hardware RAID array, then it won't show the individual drives.

@Thidsa have you opened a ticket at https://stablebit.com/contact yet? Also, have you ran a CHKDSK pass of the system disk?

This is likely normal. New files are placed on the drive with the most free space. This is measured absolutely, and not based on the percentage used. For the rest, that's definitely not typical. I store my steam library on the pool, without any issues... However, if this is happening, it sounds like the partition stable is getting screwed up. If the drive still has a drive letter, then you may be able to fix it by running a CHKDSK pass on the drive. Otherwise, you'd want to run data recovery on the drive. However, if it's the same disk that has this happening to it, then it may be simpler to just remove the drive and replace it.

I see that you've opened an issue for this as well. I've posted there. But this is very weird. But hopefully, we'll get things working for you soon.

In theory, the pool will do that, but ... only after filling some capacity. The default behavior of the pool is to place new files on the disk(s) with the most available free space. If all of the disks have the same amount of free space, then it will place the files evenly between the drives. However, if you want it to force the drives to be equally filled as soon as they're added to the pool, then you can install the Drive Space Equalizer balancer plugin: StableBit DrivePool Balancer Plugins

Do you mean after formatting? If so, then you'd need to clear the status. The status is handled independently of Windows or any data it stores, since it doesn't actually log the same things. So there is no real way to hook into that. If you clear the status of the damaged sectors, it will rescan them, and if they're fixed, it will clear them. Otherwise, it will reflag them.

Yeah, there is no issue with hosting all of the folders on the pool. The "Shadowcopy" warning is normal, and shouldn't be a problem.

Sorry, not yet. But I'll bug/talk to Alex about this.

No, it doesn't. Though depending on the size of the file(s) in question and the size of your cache, then it may do this automatically, if you access the file. Aside from that, there isn't anything implemented to do so, though it is something that we may add in the future.

StableBit DrivePool doesn't have a master and subordinate/duplicate copy. Both are equally viable, and treated as such. This is very different from how Drive Bender handles things.5 As for being documented, not really, but sort of. Eg: https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Knowledge_base#How_To.27s That said, if the data is in the same relative path under the PoolPart folders, they're considered duplicates. Changing the duplication settings, or even remeasuring can kick off a duplication pass that will automatically prune the duplicates, as needed. Also, the "dpcmd" utility has an option to disable duplication for the entire pool, recursively. However, that kicks off a duplication pass that actually manages the files. Just have both products installed. That's it. You can fine tune settings in StableBit DrivePool, in the balancing settings, as the "StableBit Scanner" balancer is one of the 5 preinstalled balancer plugins. That should be fixed now. Though, the file system scan won't trigger the drive evacuation. And yeah, that fix was shipping in the 2.5.5 version, and the latest stable release is 2.5.6, so this definitely shouldn't be an issue anymore. (we haven't seen it in a while).