Shane

Hi Kaylus, I see noone has yet replied, do you still need help?

I have both read reports of, and experienced myself, drives "fixing" their own SMART records re bad sectors. Whether this is because the drive is correcting a false positive, or because the drive firmware thinks you don't need to know that it used up some undocumented "slack space" to cover for the bad sectors, or some other reason, I've no idea and can only speculate.

#1 - For future reference re MatBailie's query: if you physically remove a drive without removing it from the pool first, DrivePool will complain about the missing drive and switch to read-only recovery mode until you either plug the drive back in or tell DrivePool that it should drop the missing drive. DrivePool, like RAID, is not designed as a backup solution. It is designed as a redundancy solution. As Drashna suggests, for backing up a pool of drives you would use a second pool of drives and a sync tool (my current personal favourite is FreeFileSync, but that's just personal preference and your mileage may vary). #2 - Hi Dunedon, just a caution, there are certain conditions (involving the pool being near-full or being moved to a new OS) where disk content might NOT remain static. Drashna: this gives me an idea for a DrivePool suggestion - is it possible, or could it be made possible, for a user to see when DrivePool last wrote (including as part of a balancing operation) to a particular drive in the pool?

Hmm. I would make sure v1 is uninstalled, and then reboot, before installing v2 (regardless of whether either was the "Win7" or "WHS" flavours).

Hi, Vortex12. Because under normal conditions a file system will try to avoid using damaged parts of a drive, and the whole point of File Recovery is to deliberately access those damaged parts of the drive to attempt the recovery of broken files, it's unavoidable that the Read Error rate is going to go up fast - and any decent OS that monitors SMART is going to flag this as a Bad Thing. All that SMART knows is that there's a sizable number of pending dubious sectors and the read error rate is going up fast. Frankly I'd be a LOT more upset if it wasn't warning me about probable imminent drive failure! (like, coincidentally, last night, when the OS drive on my home server died without any warning at all... )

Q: Hi, Is it possible to set DrivePool to duplicate a folder to all disks available in the pool regardless of their number? A: You would have to set that folder's duplication level so that it was equal to the number of disks in the pool. For example, if your pool consisted of ten disks, you would set that folder's duplication level (number of copies) to 10. Q: And another question - is it possible to set DrivePool that way, that it keeps one copy of a folder on one specific disk? For example I have 3 disks and I want one folder to be duplicated twice and one copy I need on one specific disk and the other can be on any of that two remaining disks. A: Not yet. It's a planned feature. http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/208-stablebit-drivepool-controlling-folder-placement/

Yes, if you don't use the pool late at night, that would be a good time to have CrashPlan do the backups. As drashna notes, if automatic balancing is on but not immediate, it defaults to 1am - but since in our scenario we're not using automatic balancing that's not a concern (the idea is that we want the pool to just do the bare minimum of balancing, and do so immediately as required, so that CrashPlan is not wasting bandwidth on files that have been moved between drives - though things might get tricky if we get close to filling all of the drives).

If our intent is to backup the entire pool via CrashPlan, and if we are NOT using duplication, then I might go with something like: 1. Set DrivePool to "do not balance automatically" and TICK "allow balancing plug-ins to force immediate balancing". 2. Turn off the "Volume Equalization" and "Duplication Space Optimizer" balancers. 3. Turn on the "Ordered File Placement" balancer. 4. If feasible, set CrashPlan to do its backups when you are not using the pool, so that it does not read files while DP is moving them around. 5. Then tell CrashPlan to back up the hidden poolpart folders on each drive that forms the pool. This should minimise the amount of wasted traffic. There might be more optimization we can do, too. If we ARE using duplication, then things get messy. Frankly, it would be a lot easier if CrashPlan just implemented a "skip existing files" option.

I'm using WHS 2011. And if Safely Remove works for you, go for it, no need to do a shutdown if so.

For what it's worth, I also use FreeFileSync to backup to/from pools, without issue (if you are using NTFS permissions to secure parts of the pool on a per-user basis, remember to tick the relevant box in FFS's global options), and Safely Remove Hardware releases the drives, pretty much exactly as you describe (though minus the fireproof data safe, something I should remedy). My bugbear is Microsoft's search indexing service, which does not seem to respect Safely Remove (or anything else, really, besides a reboot). My personal experience is that DrivePool itself only holds pool drives/files/folders open when: you are actively writing to the pool; you are actively reading from the pool; the pool is being balanced, duplicated or remeasured; or (sometimes) you have the DrivePool GUI open.

Note that DrivePool's duplication does one thing very well - it does its best to ensure you will have any given file on at least two disks. So if what you're worried about is losing files due to a drive failure, then (like drashna said) just add your extra drives and turn on duplication. Done. What it doesn't do is allow you to mandate which two disks hold copies of a particular file (the Ordered File Placement balancer may look like it can achieve this, but not quite). So if you have N disks in a pool and your duplication is set at less than xN, there is currently no way in DrivePool to ensure that any two disks will have a copy of any other two disks. (now, if DrivePool could be used on itself, then you could do that - you'd just create two pools of N disks each, with duplication disabled, and then pool those two pools, with duplication enabled - and if it was truly volume agnostic, one could also do tricks like rotating and/or offsite backups! )

For performance and simplicity reasons DrivePool does not keep an index of the contents of pooled drives, so there's no DrivePool-based method to tell what was on a failed drive (if it wasn't duplicated); it's really more the sort of thing a backup/restore app should handle... ... and this is where I discover that my own choice of cloud-based backup does not offer an option to "restore folder XYZ but skip existing files". Well, that's really annoying. If I'm only missing X, I don't want to have to download X+Y+Z+kitchensink. Hopefully your provider offers such an option. If not...is there any way you can get a list of the files in your backup to compare to a list of the remaining files in the pool?

Is the cloud backup of the pool or of the individual drives? (I'd guess the individual drives, but just making sure)

Hmm. If I had to make a rather wild guess, I'd... rather not. Could be Windows, could be the USB dock, could be.... But I would keep a figurative eye on that drive for a while. Maybe give it a "probation period" and for now set DrivePool to only use it for duplicated data (or data you've got backed up elsewhere). And if you've got Stablebit Scanner (or would like to make use of its 30 day free trial!) I'd suggest having it regularly scan the drive in the background.

Just to be on the safe side, 1) what was the OS on the other computer you tried to view the drive with? 2) is it WHS2011 or DrivePool that said the disk was missing? 3) does WHS2011's Disk Management also report the drive as RAW?

Can you post a screenshot of your Balancing's Setting tab page?

Oh, nice find, CptKirk1 - it (Auslogics Disk Defrag) has large fragment support, works on WHS, and it can defrag all of your disks at the same time. Bonus points!

Hi perryni, when you add a drive to the pool, any files already existing on the drive are not moved into the pool; only the drive's free space is made available to the pool. This allows you to still use the drive to keep files separately from the pool (for whatever reason). For example, say you have two drives X and Y. You create a pool, Z, from these two drives. Now you still have your X and Y drives, which you can still use on their own, as well as a pool Z which makes use of the free space on X and Y combined. Does that help?

I've noticed that even when you _don't_ select Duplicate Later, copies of pooled files may remain on a removed disk. What seems to be happening is that, when removing a drive from the pool, DrivePool may encounter files that are being held open by Windows*. While it can't delete them, if it can still succeed in copying them, then it will continue to remove the drive from the pool. So if the removal process completes without any error/warning messages about lost/uncopyable files, then DrivePool has successfully copied all files that were in that poolpart to the rest of the pool, the poolpart folder on the drive will be set visible instead of hidden, and the drive can be physically removed even if files are still "on" the drive. *(I've noticed the Windows search/metadata engine in particular has a nasty habit of not bothering to release files straight away when it's done with them)

I've found "positive pressure" filtered cases can noticeably reduce dust and salt intake; you just have to remember to clean the filters every so often to maintain the pressure ratio (and also so that the case doesn't overheat - and for this I can plug Scanner, with it's emailed and spoken overheat warnings).

This I can answer: yes, they do. DrivePool is well-behaved re idle drives.

I'm not sure what you mean, Blake? If your trial has expired or you have not reactivated your license, the entire pool turns read-only until a license is activated - a completely separate issue to Windows folder and file permissions/ownership problems that can be caused by moving drives between computers.

@Drashna: btb66 had two separate issues, the first about the difficulties he encountered with ownership/permissions problems due to moving the drives (which you have answered/explained), the second about an unresolved problem with sharing a folder across an unmanaged network for specific users (which I was answering/explaining).

Yes, as Drashna says, DrivePool should accept a cloned disk, just do NOT let it see both disks at the same time until you've removed the poolpart from the original disk. I'm curious, why not just start it as an overnight job before you go to sleep? That it will take hours shouldn't matter then. At 50MB/sec it would've taken under 12 hours, or less than the time between when you first posted and when Drashna replied. Hmm. Do you happen to recall exactly how many hours it took to remove your 2TB disk last time? Wondering if we should establish some benchmarks for removing disks (e.g. to help answer questions like "hey, it's been fourteen hours and my 2TB disk hasn't finished removing yet, is something wrong?").

Make sure the user has an account on all of the networked PCs with the same username and password as on the Windows 8 machine. This article http://windows.microsoft.com/en-AU/windows-8/share-files-folders explains how to share an item (e.g. your Work folder) in Windows 8. Share the folder such that only that user has view and edit permissions; make sure nobody else's username is on the list.