Christopher (Drashna)

As for the WD Green Drive, it depends on the SMART warnings. If it's a high Load Cycle Count, then as long as that is the only issue, it may be fine. If there are other issues, or it's near the end of the warranty period, then definitely RMA it. As for the WD Black drive. I'm guessing this is for unreadable sectors (the surface scan)? If so, try running "chkdsk x: /r" on the drive and see if that helps (If this is for windows 8 or Server 2012 or up, add "/scan" at the end of command). And if the drive is near the end of it's warranty, then it may be worth RMAing it anyways.

We absolutely agree. However, when we say that it's throttled badly, I mean that it's throttled REALLY REALLY badly, and actually causes issues with how StableBit CloudDrive works so that it's not reliably enough. And ... if it takes you a year or more to fill up that 10TBs even with a good upload speed (lets say 20mbps) .... is it really worth it? That said, we do offer the ability to use OneDrive as a Cloud Provider, but only as an experimental one. And we're not the only ones that have noticed just how slow OneDrive is, either. I've seen mention of cloud to cloud services mentioning this as well (and they're on super high end fiber, getting many GB/s speeds, in theory). However, if Microsoft fixes the throttling issues, then we will happily and eagerly enable the OneDrive provider by default.

You are very welcome. And I hope you're able to recover your data (either through duplication, backups or ... if needed, data recovery). If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask.

For everyone interested, we have officially released StableBit CloudDrive. It is a public beta at this point, so we do expect some bugs and troubleshooting initially. After that, we do have some plans for StableBit Scanner and StableBit DrivePool, but these shouldn't (hopefully) take too long. And I know that Alex is keen on getting StableBit FileSafe started, as well.

I'm glad to hear that you were excited to see it! As for the license, yes, activate the trial. Each time there is a new major beta build released, it will reset the 30 day count so that you have time to test out any new features or fixes without having to worry about the amount of time left on the trial. Or you can buy a license now (there is a "Pre-release" discount for early adopters).

When this happened, did the same thing happen on the underlying disk (to the file/folder in the corresponding PoolPart folder)? If so, then this is not a DrivePool issue specifically, and something affecting the disk directly. And if that is the case, it may be a hardware issue (check for loose connections, or even swap out the SATA cable). And running a "Burst test" on the drive using StableBit Scanner may be a good idea, to see if there is an issue with the controller or the drive's hardware.

Well, if you want to create a really, really large cache ..... But yeah, that's not practical for most people, a "real" answer would be better. Amazon S3 and Azure Storage are your best bets for speed and reliability. Hands down. However, they are more expensive, or at least can be. They charge by the amount of data stored, and the amount of traffic. Which can get expensive quickly. As for the "consumer" solutions, OneDrive is basically unusable, and Amazon Cloud Drive is very error prone (to the point that verification is enabled by default to ensure no corruption). And I'm not as sure about DropBox and Box. But as I said, Alex is going to post about this based on our testing during the development. And as we add more providers, maybe we'll find that "golden goose".

Well, the logs don't show anything wrong happying or any permissions being changed when the logging was enabled. If you did see them changed, then something is changing them outside the pool (or maybe there is a disk/controller issue). Is this happening to one specific disk or group of disks? If so, there may be an issue with that disk or controller, maybe. Also, I didn't notice earlier, but it looks like you have FlexRAID installed. Is this configured to use the pooled disks (for parity or the like)? If so, it may be FlexRAID that is causing the issues you're seeing. A way to check for that, is to use procmon and ... well, watch for what's causing it. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb896645.aspx

Thank you for grabbing that. I've flagged the issue (and files) for Alex, and he'll take a look at the issue soon. https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/16667

First, I'm sorry to hear about the drive, as that is never a pleasant experience. As for the pool, once you remove the disk, the pool should return to working just fine. In fact, after doing so, it will recheck the entire pool and reduplicate files as needed. If you only had duplicates on the external USB drive, then you should be fine, and haven't actually lost anything! But if the drive had unduplicated data on it, that's lost, unless you had a backup of it, or can get it back via data recovery. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, Recuva, iCare, or TestDisk may be able to recovery the partitions or the files from the drive. While this can happen to any disk, USB drives are particularly susceptible to this. If the drive was writing to the partition table when the disk disconnected (ether intentionally, accidentally, or periodically), this can damage the partition table and cause this to happen. USB drives ... well they're really easy to bump and disconnect the drive.

I've removed the double post for you. As for the file placement, by default, the pool places files on the disks with the most available space (absolute, not percentage). That's not what you want, from the sounds of it. From what you've said, you may want to check out the SSD Optimizer balancer. While it's designed with SSDs in mind, it will work with ANY type of drive. https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Plugins Set the 4TB fast drive as the "SSD" drive and the rest as archive drives, and it will write to that drive first, and then move it to the other drives later on. If you want to add all of the drives to the same pool, that may not work well with the SSD Optimizer balancer. In this case, you could set up a File Placement rule to put the \Videos folder on the specific drives. Or you could create a second pool.

Well, first I'm sorry to hear about the horrible internet bandwidth. As for the errors, you will definitely want to modify the connection. Open the UI, change to the drive in question, and click on "Drive Options". Select the "Performance Options" entry. See if decreasing the number of threads help. If not, try tweaking the prefetching options. If that doesn't help, there are a bunch of advanced settings that may help here: http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_CloudDrive_Advanced_Settings Basically, you'd want to tweak with the entire IoManager section. Try setting the HttpTimeoutMs to a higher value, set the retries to a higher value, increase the timeout for the "Abort" values, and lower the default connection limit. After making these changes, reboot the system, and see if that helps.

Amazon Cloud Drive definitely has connectivity issues. Specifically, we have "upload verification" enabled by default, which consumes a lot more bandwidth and cache because it silently errors out occasionally (the errors you're seeing, most likely). As for performance, this also depends heavily on the cache settings you've set. A larger cache should get better performance, as well. And yes, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage are definitely more expensive, IIRC. Alex is writing a "nuts and bolts" post about how to tweak the settings to optimize it for different setups.

This depends on CrashPlan, specifically. But I do believe that the personal edition will install on Server 2012R2 Essentials. If you mean about using StableBit CloudDrive with CrashPlan, it looks like it may support it.

To clarify what I mean here: If you want to ensure that one copy of a duplicate file is on a CloudDrive, but you don't care where the other copy is (or it can be on any local disk). This can be confusing and a bit counterintuitive. Additionally, this will cause your system to want to continually rebalance, as the balancing ratio will always be off. To start off with, you'll need to micromanage the pool a bit. You'll need to create a rule for the folders that you want duplicated (or use "\* " for the entire pool). In this rule, select ONLY the CloudDrive disk. Hit "Ok". You may want to disable the automatic balancing, or at least disable the "Allow balancing plug-ins to force immediate balancing" option. This should help reign in the balancing, so that it's not always attempting to do so. We do plan to add a "duplication grouping" option to handle this entire process natively, specifically for better synergy/integration between StableBit CloudDrive and StableBit DrivePool. However, we don't have an ETA on that, as it may be very complicated to implement.

Richard, What are the settings for the Balancer settings? Namely, when it balances, and the ratio for which it balances.

No. We don't host any of the data at all. StableBit CloudDrive provides a service, really. And that is converting your cloud storage accounts (Such as DropBox, Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon S3, etc) and creates a virtual drive. These "drives" can then be added to the pool. And then, yes, mirrored to the cloud. You can check out details here: http://blog.covecube.com/2015/05/introducing-stablebit-clouddrive/

Beaker, Just to clarify, the encryption for CloudDrive is done as SOON as it hits the driver. That means that even the local cache is actually encrypted. http://blog.covecube.com/2015/05/introducing-stablebit-clouddrive/ At no point is it not encrypted, basically. As for the file location: File Placement rules allow you to specify which folders, or even files end up on which drive. This feature was actually developed SPECIFICALLY with StableBit CloudDrive in mind. http://blog.covecube.com/2014/05/stablebit-drivepool-2-1-0-553-rc-file-placement-and-product-3/ (StableBit CloudDrive is the "Product 3" mentioned, in fact). However, this post goes over the feature more. http://blog.covecube.com/2014/04/stablebit-drivepool-2-1-0-503-beta-per-folder-balancing/ And if you set the file placement rules to only place the specific files on the CloudDrive part, and set the duplication level to 2x or higher, the duplicates will be placed on any other disk in the pool (as it cannot find a suitable drive, as per the file placement rules).

Sorry for the posting issue, I've cleaned up the other threads. And yeah, the "System Managed" option can cause issues, in some cases. Glad you were able to figure it out!

Namely, it didn't make the cut for the beta. We do plan on adding it later, but thank you for mentioning it (to remind us).

Could you grab the "CoveFS" folder as well?

Because we've already have had a couple of questions about this, in their current forms, StableBit DrivePool works VERY well with StableBit Cloud Drive already. The StableBit CloudDrive drive disks appear as normal, physical disks. This means that you can add them to a Pool without any issues or workarounds. Why is this important and how does it affect your pool? You can use the File Placement Rules to control what files end up on which drive. This means that you can place specific files on a specific CloudDrive. You can use the "Disk Usage Limiter" to only allow duplicated data to be placed on specific drives, which means you can place only duplicated files on a specific CloudDrive disk. These are some very useful tricks to integrate the products, already. And if anyone else finds some neat tips or tricks, we'll add them here as well.

Once you've enabled the ProviderRegistry setting, it will show the OneDrive and any other "experimental" providers (it's the only one, ATM, IIRC). I don't think we plan on removing it, but we'll post here if we do. And it should receive updates, if there are any (we don't expect there to be so, unless Microsoft makes a significant change to OneDrive). As for "outside of the pool", well we use raw blocks of data (think "sectors" on the disk), so there isn't a way to import data to the CloudDrive (like there is with StableBit DrivePool). Sorry. Though, there may be ways around this... I'll have to investigate/confer with Alex about that. As for integration with DrivePool, you can already add the CloudDrive to a pool! And in fact, the "File Placement Rules" were a hugely important "pre-release" feature for CloudDrive (just think about that for a moment ). And you can use the built in "Disk Usage Limiter" to only place duplicated files on the CloudDrive disk, actually. So, there was definitely some planning for the StableBit CloudDrive product with StableBit DrivePool! As for RoboCopy, you shouldn't need to do that. Depending on how much data you need to place on the CloudDrive... Well, set the Cache size to be at least that size when you create the initial drive. The cache stores all the files locally when you write the data. It then uploads that data as quickly as it can, based on your settings (these settings can get very complicated, though). The cache is also used when reading files (to prefetch reads, specifically). So as long as you have a large cache, you shouldn't see any issues on your end. It just make take forever to upload everything. Even with 20+mbps upload speed. As for Alternative providers, DropBox offers 1TB for $9.95/month and Amazon CloudDrive offers unlimited storage for $59.95/year. Both work very well. But Amazon CloudDrive does have some issues (you'll see a lot of retries, and we have "verification" enabled by default which uses a LOT more bandwidth).

Not every Cloud Provider is going to be listed. And that's okay. For the public beta, we focused on the most prolific and popular cloud storage providers. If you don't see a specific provider in StableBit CloudDrive, let us know and we'll look into it. If you can provide a link to the SDK/API, it would be helpful, but it's not necessary. Just because you see it listed here does not me we will add the provider. Whether we add them or not depends on a number of factors, including time to develop them, stability, reliability, and functionality, among other factors. Providers already requested: Mega https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/15659 SharePoint https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/16678 WebDAV IceDrive OwnCloud (SabreDAV) https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/16679 OpenStack Swift https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/17692 OpenDrive https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/17732 Added, but free tier not suitable for use with StableBit CloudDrive Yandex.Disk https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/20833 EMC Atmos https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/25926 Strato HiDrive https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/25959 Citrix ShareFile https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/27082 Email support (IMAP, maybe Pop) https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/27124 May not be reliable , as this heavily depends on the amount of space that the provider allows. And some providers may prune messages that are too old, go over the quota, etc. JottaCloud https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/27327 May not be usable, as there is no publicly documented API. FileRun https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/27383 FileRun is a Self Hosted, PHP based cloud storage solution. Free version limited to 3 users, enterprise/business licensing for more users/features available. JSON based API. SpiderOak https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/27532 JSON based API Privacy minded pCloud https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/27939 JSON based API OVH Cloud https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/28204 StorJ https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/28364 Providers like tardigrade.io appear to use this library/API iDrive Amazon S3 Compatible API. No need for separate provider. ASUS WebStorage https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/28407 Documentation ... is difficult to read, making it hard to tell if support is possible. Apple iCloud https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/28548 uptobox https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/28633 sCloud https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/28650 Providers that will not be added: Degoo No publicly accessible API. Without an API that support reading and writing files to the provider, there is no possibility of adding support for this provider. Sync.com No publicly accessible API Without an API that support reading and writing files to the provider, there is no possibility of adding support for this provider. Amazon Glacier https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/16676 There is a 4+ hour wait time to access uploaded data. This means Amazon Glacier completely unusable to us. We couldn't even perform upload verification on content due to this limitation. HubiC https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/16677 It's OpenStack - No need for a separate provider. CrashPlan? https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/15664 The API provided appears to be mostly for monitoring and maintenance. No upload/download calls, so not suitable for StableBit CloudDrive, unfortunately. MediaFire Not suitable due to stability issues. Thunderdrive No publicly accessible API. LiveDrive No Publicly accessible API. Zoolz No Publicly accessible (developer) API Proton Drive No Publicly accessible API

Well, the Beta includes the normal 30 day, fully featured trial. No need to commit to buying now (but there is a reward for doing so!). The list of providers we've included by default are the main, well know providers. Since this is a public beta, we can definitely add additional providers. As for Mega, it does appear to have an SDK for accessing their services, so it may be possible to add a provider. I've flagged the request for Alex (in addition to including the SDK link to him).