Shane

Yes; x2 on all but the criticals (e.g. financials) which are x3 (they don't take much space anyway). It is, as you say, a somewhat decent and comfortable middle road against loss (in addition to the backup machine of course). Drive dies? Entire pool is still readable while I'm getting a replacement. I do plan to eventually - unless StableBit releases a "DrivePool v3" with parity built in - move to a ZFS NAS or similar but today is not that day (nor is this month, maybe not this year either).

Does the problem go away if you revert the update (navigate to Settings > Windows Update > Update history > Uninstall updates and find the most recent, or if it was a full version upgrade, e.g. 23H2 to 24H2, you can do so within 10 days or so via Settings > System > Recovery > Go Back)? (either way, particularly the latter, I recommend you have a backup handy in case Windows gets worse instead of better) Also if you can identify the particular update causing the problem please let us know!

1) If you open Windows Disk Management, are any of the Disks "Read Only"? Try the solution in this post (it also shows a screenshot of what to look for). 2) If that doesn't help or isn't applicable, try resetting the pool's NTFs permissions? Try the solutions in this post. Please let us know how it goes, and if the above don't help I'd suggest opening a support ticket.

In Windows Disk Management (which has a GUI) you can choose to mount a drive to a path instead of to a letter (or both). The advantage of using paths instead of letters is that this lets Explorer (and any other file manager) access any number of drives instead of only 26. For example say you have a folder "c:\mount", you can create a bunch of empty subfolders within it called "disk1", "disk2", etc and then in Disk Management you add each drive in your pool to the subfolder you created for it (doesn't have to be disk1, etc, it could be the serial number of each drive or any other distinctive method. You can then browse those drives via those subfolders. Then (for example) dir c:\mount /s /b > c:\mount\list.txt would output a file containing a sorted-by-disk list of all your files on those drives: c:\mount\disk1\poolpart.A\doc.txt c:\mount\disk2\poolpart.B\apple.jpg c:\mount\disk3\poolpart.C\video.avi If you wanted a separate file for each drive you could create a batch that did separate dir /s /b commands for each disk. Just don't put the mounting folder in your pool drive (e.g. if your pool uses P: don't use P:\mount) as that risks an endless loop. Otherwise, to have DrivePool save file tables per disk as a built-in option, you could try submitting a feature request via the Contact form.

If you have all your poolpart disks mounted to a path under the same folder, e.g. e:\disks\, then you can use the Windows Task Scheduler to set a daily task that runs a command along the lines of dir e:\disks\ /s /b > "e:\pooldirs%date%%time%.log" or similar (if you've got a LOT of files per disk, you might want to do some parallelisation). Note that if your date and time format involves slashes or colons you'll need to use something different, e.g. %date:/=%%time::=% to strip those characters.

Hi Ben, yes it's moving one file at a time (it's also doing stuff that lets you continue to use the pool and those files even while they're being moved). Without duplication enabled (I presume), faster alternatives pretty much require stopping the pool in some fashion: 1. You can clone the disk but you should do so on a different machine so that DrivePool never sees the original and the clone at the same time. If the clone isn't perfect enough DrivePool might not recognise the poolpart as part of the pool but then you'd just have to seed the new disk. The pool will be read-only while the disk is missing. 2. You can use dpcmd to ignore the old disk (the disk will show up as "missing" in the GUI and the pool drive will become read-only), use the GUI to add the new disk, then copy/move the user content* you want out of the old disk's hidden poolpart folder into the new disk's hidden poolpart folder (with whatever method you prefer, so long as it supports alternate data streams**), then remove the "missing" old disk via the GUI (at which point the pool drive will be writable again). * For example don't move the .covefs, $RECYCLE.BIN or System Volume Information folders. ** If it doesn't, you'll need to redo any duplication levels you've set on the pool. P.S. Either way you'd have to cancel the current removal process first.

That description looks a bit confusing? Checking if I'm understanding this: you have two machines, I'll call them host1 and host2 host1 has a 4TB physical drive, mounted as drive "W" and shared as "\\host1\something" host1's drive (and thus share) contains a CloudDrive data folder (that I'm guessing was created at some point in the past, since you mention "given the data that I believed was on it"?) host2 has CloudDrive installed, you've connected to "\\host1\something" via the File Share provider and you're trying to use it to get access to the content stored in the above folder? If so: you should be using the Attach function in host2's CloudDrive (this is to access an existing data folder on the connected provider and mount the resulting the virtual drive), not the Create function (this is to create a new data folder on the connected provider and mount the resulting virtual drive) if the data folder was originally created via a provider other than the File Share provider you will need to convert the folder first (via the command-line utility CloudDrive.Convert.exe) and I strongly recommend backing up the data folder before conversion if it contains any irreplaceable data.

Hi, changing the drive letter/path (e.g. via Windows Disk Management) of a disk in a pool doesn't affect DrivePool. Just don't change the hidden PoolPart.* folders on the disks.

Hi, if the trial's expired your config and data should all be still there; trial pools become read-only when a trial expires (and if activated become editable again). As to the trial expiring in hours instead of a month like it should have lasted I suggest opening a support ticket with StableBit to sort it out!

You should be fine. DrivePool identifies poolpart drives by the data internal to each drive, not their position on a controller. Basically so long as Windows can find and read the drives (e.g. they show up in Disk Management as basic NTFS volumes), so too should DrivePool.

This thread may help you with regard to NTFS permissions:

Hi, DrivePool does not inspect - nor does it block the inspection of - the content inside your files. If you're getting warnings about suspicious files, that's whatever security software you're using (or the one built into Windows) doing its own job. If you're certain they're false positives then most security software allows you to set exclusions on particular files, folders or drives; depending on how pervasive the security software is you may need to exclude both the pool and the poolparts because it may scan both (e.g. I leave my pool drive included but exclude all the hidden poolpart folders on drives that form it so that the security software doesn't "double up" its scanning).

I've seen this a couple of times over the years with large old(er) pools/drives. If I had to make a wild guess I'd suspect the removal process gets stuck while attempting to clean up the empty folders after it's moved all the files, maybe from either a bug (too much folder depth hitting a pathing limit?) or Windows locking a folder when it shouldn't or a broken NTFS ACL somewhere. After double-checking the duplication was in order (it was each time) I removed the "missing" drive and it carried on normally.

Have you opened a support ticket with Stablebit?

If the only balancers you are using are the Ordered File Placement and Scanner, you could try ticking all the boxes under "Plug-in settings" and "File placement settings"?