Shane
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Posts posted by Shane
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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?
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Is the cloud backup of the pool or of the individual drives? (I'd guess the individual drives, but just making sure)
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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.
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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?
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Can you post a screenshot of your Balancing's Setting tab page?
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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!
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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?
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Thanks Alex. For another example, I know some people (including myself) like to store a backup of their DVD collections on their server for easy access; if they were keeping their library under p:\dvdlibrary\ with each DVD having its own folder, and wanted to ensure that all the VOB files for a given title were kept on the same disk (e.g. to avoid having a movie interrupted if the server had to wake the next drive out of sleep/standby):
with my suggestion they could do so with a single rule, "keep together all files in each folder of p:\dvdlibrary\*" and the pool would internally handle which disk each set of files were kept on
whereas with only basic path-to-disks matching, as soon as their library exceeded the size of a single disk in the pool they would have to micro-manage which title(s) were associated with which disk(s).
Of course, the underlying logic of my method might end up requiring DrivePool to dynamically generate some sort of path-to-disk ruleset to handle the internal housekeeping, but as a user I would prefer that not to be my problem (*grin*).
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I'd like the ability to say "keep together all files in any|each folder of folderpath" where "any" and "each" are modifiers affecting which files to keep together.
So given an example where folderpath was p:\media\sketches\* and I had files in p:\media\sketches\2012 and p:\media\sketches\2013
if the "any" modifier was selected
then the files in sketches\2012 and sketches\2013 and any subfolders thereof would be kept all together
but if the "each" modifier was selected
and the files in sketches\2012 and any subfolders thereof would be kept together
and the files in sketches\2013 and any subfolders thereof would be kept together
yet sketches\2012 and sketches\2013 would be stored independently of each other.
Also, something along the lines of if folderpath ends in "folder\" it also applies to any files within that folder itself, while if it ends in "folder\*" it only applies to files within that folder's subfolders.
I hope this makes sense.
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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)
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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).
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Also, do the drives still follow the spin-down times as set in Windows power savings?
This I can answer: yes, they do. DrivePool is well-behaved re idle drives.
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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.
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@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).
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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?").
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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.
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It's a combination of drive, controller/motherboard and operating system. In theory, if you have a SATA drive with AHCI enabled for it on the motherboard and you are running Vista or later, you should be able to hot-swap the drives - typically via the "Safely Remove/Eject" tray icon. If you can't see your drive in the icon's list, it isn't in a hot-swappable configuration.
Warning: if your Windows boot drive is set to IDE, changing it to AHCI without editing the registry first will cause it to BSOD: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976 (not that you can hotswap the Windows boot drive anyway, but some motherboards don't allow you to change IDE/AHCI settings just for the non-boot drives).
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This is unfortunately a Windows problem - sometimes it will "bump" a drive letter to a different letter when you add a drive while the system is powered down or a drive is/was missing (e.g. you have C, D, E, F; F is your pool; you shut down the OS to add a new drive, but rather than call it G, Windows may decide to call it F and bump the previous F drive to the next available letter).
I recommend setting the drive letter(s) of your pool(s) close to the end of the alphabet (e.g. P, Q, etc) to reduce the risk of this happening.
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Yes, you can do this. Be mindful of the quality of the SSD you plan to use - most(?) have greatly improved, but the lifespan of an SSD is still ultimately proportional to the number of write/erase cycles, and feeder disk activity is basically a daily series of write/erase events.
And since the SSD will also have your OS on it, if your SSD's manufacturer has software that allows you to monitor the projected remaining life of the disk (e.g. Intel's Toolbox and Samsung's Magician software), I'd strongly recommend using it.
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Does DrivePool remember the drive letter of an "absent" pool, or would that have to be manually corrected if/as needed?
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And then there's taking a fourth option!
Create a second pool. Add the 4TB array to it.On one of your drives (other than your pool drive), create and share a folder called "MetaPool" (or whatever).
Under it, create a folder for each of your pools, e.g. "Pool 1", "Pool 2". Use the Disk Management utility to add each as a mount path for its corresponding pool.
Congratulations, you now have multiple pools all under one shared folder.
Pros: files in the array's pool can benefit from DrivePool features.
cons: the capacity of the 4TB array can't be shared with your first pool since multiple pools can't share space on a physical drive.
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Short answer: not currently.
Longer answer: some very bright spark needs to write a DP plug-in that enables this.
Taking a third option:
Let's call your 4TB RAID 5 array "F:" and your two 3TB drives "G:" and "H:", and your pool "P:"...
Open up Explorer. Create and share a folder that we'll call "F:\MetaPool", and underneath that create two more folders.
The first we'll call "F:\MetaPool\The Folder You Want".
The second we'll call "F:\MetaPool\The Pool You Have".
Open up Disk Management. Find "P:" and right click, choose "Change Drive Letter...", choose "Add...", choose "Mount...", and browse to "The Pool You Have" that you created on "F:". Click okay until you get back Disk Management.
Congratulations, you now have a shared folder called "MetaPool" that contains both "The Pool You Have" and "The Folder You Want".
Yes, it's true that "The Folder You Want" isn't actually _in_ your pool, but since you only want the files in that folder to be on the array....
Disadvantages: files in "The Folder You Want" can't benefit from the features of DrivePool, such as feeder disks and duplication.
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Pools are independent of each other, so there should be no issues
(other than, of course, DrivePool warning you that one of your pools is missing all of its drives). Edit: See Drashna's post below!
Second Pool for Backup
in General
Posted
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!
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