Shane
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Posts posted by Shane
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"Because my eternal USB hard drives are not brand new, I believe the scanner is essential in conjunction with DrivePool. Am I correct?"
Scanner is good for detecting when drives are going bad, and DrivePool can detect Scanner's warnings to attempt to evacuate a bad drive to the rest of its pool before it fails. Both can also be configured to provide email (or with the paid cloud service, or via third party tools, push/SMS notifications) alerts.
"How can I configure automatic backup from the local pooled drive to the cloud? Maybe, I can create two pooed drives, one is local using the external USB drives, and another is cloud pooled drive using my cloud services?"
That would be an option, yes. You could then use a third-party tool to perform the backups from the local pool to the cloud pool.
"Can the duplicate function work between pools? Or, duplication work only within folders in the same pooled drive?
Duplication settings are per-pool (optionally per-folder within a pool). If you wished to have DrivePool duplicate "across" pools, you could create (for example) a "main pool", a "local pool" (consisting of your USB drives) and a "cloud pool" (consisting of your cloud drive*), add the local and cloud pools to the main pool, and then turn on duplication for the main pool (on which you would store your data). This would result in the main pool storing duplicates in the local pool and cloud pool storage devices. Note however that this would be a "mirror", not a "backup".
*a cloud drive consists of both the remote storage service and a local cache drive (the latter acts as a buffer).
"In summary, I would like our staff to save data into the shared folder on the local pooled drive, and it should be duplicated to the cloud in real-time."
Note that "real-time" will always be throttled by the speed (and availability) of your internet connection, so I would recommend duplication on the local pool as well for local redundancy, and if what you are actually wanting is a "backup" rather than a "mirror" then I suggest using a third-party tool to backup the local pool to the cloud pool.
Also, be aware that in the event of a sudden drive loss DrivePool will respond by switching affected pool(s) to read-only mode until the issue is addressed (e.g. removing it from its pool) to prevent data corruption; to mitigate this an option is to add drives to your pool as pairs of RAID1 mirrors, such that a minimum of two drives would have to fail before the pool switched to read-only mode.
For whatever it's worth, I know of a practice that has been using a DrivePool+Scanner setup for some years now, with hourly local snapshots via File History and nightly remote backups via FreeFileSync (EDIT: making use of FFS's versioning function). They seem happy enough (and the setup has kept their data intact despite the occasional drive failure and accidental "oops deleted the wrong folder" events).
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You may need to tweak the configuration of the new DrivePool to match your old computer's custom balancing/placement settings, if any, but otherwise yes.
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Hi Cort, please see this post re a similar issue of wanting to directly move files into the pool from/using the same disk.
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Based on my experiences, the difference may be that Stablebit Scanner continually monitors SMART in (close to) real-time whereas the ones you've mentioned only check when they're run, and hard drives have both an ability to repair bad sectors (somewhat) and a reserve of spare sectors that they can use to replace the bad sectors if they can't manage a repair.
Generally the timeline goes something like this: HDD gets a bad a sectors -> HDD detects the bad sector, lists it in its SMART table -> Stablebit Scanner sees the SMART table change, alerts user -> HDD manages to repair it (or "repair" it), removes the problem from its SMART table -> "How come Scanner reported a bad sector but I can't find anything now?"
The rare temporary bad sector does happen (that's why all modern drives have a reserve). However if one of your drives starts having it happen more often then that's probably an early hint that it's time to retire that drive from doing anything important.
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There is a cloud management portal that you can create an account on to manage your StableBit licenses, although if you have any existing manual installations those have to be linked from their UI before they'll show up. Linking up to 8 devices (note: the limit is on "devices", not "licenses") is free.
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Your guess is basically correct in most respects: DrivePool will prioritise its duplication settings (reliability) over the SSD Optimizer plugin's settings (performance) in any circumstance where they conflict. However, per the documentation, duplication will (or at least should) only write to separate physical disks so splitting the SSD into two logical volumes won't be effective (and even if it was, it would also halve the write performance of the SSD).
Assuming only one SSD is available, the simplest workaround would be take advantage of DrivePool's ability to nest pools, each with their own settings:
- Create a pool (we'll call it "H") of the HDDs; set this pool to use duplication and to not use the SSD Optimizer.
- Create a pool (we'll call it "P") of the SSD and the "H" pool; set this pool to not use duplication and to use the SSD Optimizer.
- In the "P" pool set the SSD as your SSD and the "H" pool as your Archive.
You would then use the "P" pool to do your work; files in this pool will be cached to the SSD and then offloaded to the HDDs as per your SSD Optimizer settings.
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It does look like the NTFS permissions have been corrupted.
- You could try deleting the files/folders via an Administrator command prompt.
- You could try resetting the pool's NTFS permissions as outlined here by StableBit.
- You could try resetting the pool's NTFS permissions via a method I use if the above doesn't work.
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I would recommend de-activating your DrivePool license just in case anything goes wrong with the upgrade from 7 to 10, then re-activate your DrivePool license once you're successfully on 10. Your pool will be automatically detected, no need to rebuild it.
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Yes.
Files would only be left on the old drive if you tick the force damaged drive removal option (and then only unreadable files) or if you tick the archival option (in which case it would make copies of the files instead of moving them).
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Hi DP_, I've submitted your feature request (I like it). If you have other feature requests you'd like to send to StableBit directly, you can use the Contact Form to do so.
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If you're not in a rush and the old drive is healthy, in the DrivePool GUI you can just "Add" the new disk and then "Remove" the old disk (no need to tick any of the removal options).
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DrivePool keeps rolling logs in "C:\ProgramData\StableBit DrivePool\Service\Logs\" but the only reason any files/folders might appear therein would be if DrivePool encountered an error accessing them (which is not necessarily the same as an error accessing a drive that contained files/folders) and then perhaps only if you had enabled Troubleshooting -> Enable File System Logging from the GUI (which is not recommended for normal use); I'm not certain of the specifics there.
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I'd suggest manually downloading the latest versions and installing those.
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The error "oplock request is denied" means that something else is locking the file. Check for other applications that may be directly scanning or modifying files within the hidden poolpart folder(s) at the time (e.g. a virus scanner or media organiser); if possible, consider excluding the hidden poolpart folders from being directly accessed by those applications (instead have them accessed via the pool drive).
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Check your balancing settings (plugins and placement rules) to see if something has higher priority than whatever option you have set that should be sending files to that drive rather than any other(s)?
The default setting is to send files to the drive with the most free space.
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To exclude a drive from automatic scanning, right-click the drive in Scanner and choose Disk Settings then tick "Never scan surface automatically"; you may also wish to tick "Never scan file system automatically" as well.
I am not aware of any way to re-order scanning, however if it helps you it is possible to use Disk Settings to set specific drives to scan on a slower or faster schedule than the defaults established by Settings -> Scanner Settings -> Scanner.
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If the drives were repeatedly dropping out in the middle of writing to them, it's possible the file system on those drives (or on those sharing a controller with them) have been corrupted. I would recommend using chkdsk on them, and you might need to reset their permissions as described here.
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Proper method is basically to use the Manage Pool -> Balancing... -> Settings / Balancers / File Placement menus; some tweaking may be required if you try for something complex, and it can help to read the manual and the pop-up tooltips that many of the options have if you rest the mouse cursor over them.
Pool measuring knocking the disk offline is (in my experience) an indicator that the controller can't handle load, as the measuring process is quite intensive when it happens (it is used to help DrivePool's determination of what to balance, whether files are in the correct locations, whether it needs to adjust balancing ratios, etc).
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Uh... I suspect DrivePool is unable to apply them simply because the drive keeps dropping out (as whenever a drive is unavailable DrivePool will change to read-only mode to avoid risk of pool corruption), but you may wish to check the logs (gear icon in the upper right -> Troubleshooting -> Service Log) for whatever details of the problem are being reported by DrivePool.
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CloudDrive drives take up a certain amount of space on a provider's service even when "empty", expanding as required to accommodate data uploaded to the provider; that minimum is determined by a combination of the drive metadata and the API of the provider.
That said, 1TB would be way (way, way, way) too high for a brand new empty 2TB drive. Is that actually the size that Google is claiming is being used specifically by the CloudDrive folder* within your Google Drive account, or as VapechiK suggests do you have other files already stored elsewhere in your Google Drive account that would represent most of that?
*(for file-based cloud storage, e.g. Google Drive, basically the CloudDrive drive you see on your computer is translated to and from a bunch of a files kept inside a unique folder on your storage provider's drive by the CloudDrive software)
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Unfortunately no, DrivePool works at a file level and can't automatically import a set of drives that have been spanned (e.g. via Windows Disk Management or Storage Spaces), so you will have to transfer the data manually (and each drive will have to be converted back to a basic disk before it can be added to a pool).
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Depends on what you mean by clone (and presuming the drive lasts long enough to clone everything on it).
If you're cloning the whole drive, then you'll want to stop the drivepool service while both are connected or clone it on a different machine so you don't confuse drivepool (and then Remove the old drive from the pool after you've disconnected the old drive).
If you're adding the new drive to the pool then manually copying/moving the content from the old poolpart folder to the new one, you'll want to stop the drivepool service or at least turn off balancing/placement while you're doing that (and then Remove the old drive from the pool after you've disconnected the old drive).
If you're just Adding the new drive to the pool then Removing the old drive from the pool, letting DrivePool handle moving everything (perhaps with the option to handle damaged drives ticked), then you don't need to stop the service, though this is slower than the above methods (unless the old drive had Duplication enabled in which case you can use the option to re-duplicate later which makes it much faster at the cost of temporarily lowering your duplication).
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Hmm.
What happens if you shut down, disconnect all drives except your boot drive (C: presumably) then boot up? Do you still see the COVECUBECoveFsDisk___ "drives"?
Whether if so or if not, what happens if you then use Disk Management -> Action -> Rescan Disks?
If not, after the Rescan Disks, do they come back when you reconnect all the drives again?
An issue with balancing from an SSD
in General
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If the balance ratio slider for the Z: pool is set to 100% it should be balancing upon any discrepancy; if that is so set but not doing so, try un-ticking the "Or if at least this much data needs to be moved" box?