Shane
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Posts posted by Shane
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If you've got one of the tools I suggested above, you can just type the file name (or a part of it) into it and it'll show a list of matching files across all of your drives. I've got my poolpart drives mounted as e:\disks\number where number is each drive's serial number, so hypothetically I might type in "invoice 67" and Everything might show me that "invoice 67.pdf" is in "e:\disks\wcc-xyz\poolpart.bleh\docs\2021\" and "e:\disks\st-abc\poolpart.bleh\docs\2021\".
FWIW, here's how I went about mounting all of my poolpart drives:
- use Windows Disk Management to shrink my c:\ partition by 8GB and add a simple NTFS-formatted volume e:\ using that free space
- use Windows File Explorer to create a folder e:\disks and then a bunch of empty subfolders 01, 02, 03, et cetera within that folder
- use Windows Disk Management to remove any/all drive letters from my poolpart drives and instead mount each poolpart drive to those ## subfolders until every drive has its own e:\disks\## attached to it
- the disks will show up in both DrivePool (under the "Disks" column) and Scanner (under the "Drive Letter" column) with those ## paths and their serial numbers will show up too (in DrivePool by hovering the mouse cursor over each disk and in Scanner under the "Serial Number" column).
- use Windows File Explorer to rename each ## folder to their respective serial numbers - DrivePool and Scanner will automatically update accordingly
- if I add a new disk, see steps 2 through 5.
I do it this way so that I can easily restrict Everything to only the contents of my poolpart drives by typing in e:\ as the first search term (e.g. "e:\ .pdf" will show me the drive and folder location of every PDF document in my pool).
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You can use Windows Disk Management to mount the drives as folders, e.g. d:\disks\drive1, d:\disks\drive2, etc, so that you can still individually access each drive without having to give them letters.
Note: do NOT mount a drive, that's part of a pool, as a folder within a pool.
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Windows ceasing to recognise a HDD during balancing suggests you have flaky hardware/drivers. You might be able to narrow the cause down by observing which drive(s) drop out and rearranging them to see if that changes (e.g. if it's always the same drive regardless of port then it's probably the drive, if it's always the same cable or port regardless of drive then it's probably the cable or port or the port's controller/driver, etc). If that doesn't seem to be it, then it might be a power delivery issue (e.g. if you have a lot of drives and/or USB-powered ones).
If balancing is interrupted (in the GUI, the organization bar should be incomplete with an upward-pointing triangle on the right) then you can resume balancing by clicking the triangle and then clicking Re-balance.
You can also "force" a balancing check by using Manage Pool -> Balancing, clicking "Balance immediately" (even if it's already set) and then just click Save - but note that DrivePool still won't start balancing unless it finds something to balance.
You can manually "balance" files between the hidden poolpart folders that DrivePool creates on the drives that form a pool. You should ensure you maintain the folder structure within the poolparts (e.g. it is fine to manually move a file from d:\poolpart.1\exampleX\ to e:\poolpart.2\exampleX\ but manually moving a file from d:\poolpart.1\exampleX\ to e:\poolpart.2\exampleY\ should only be done if you understand what you're doing). You should manually stop the DrivePool service before doing so, start the service afterwards and then use Manage Pool -> Re-measure so that DrivePool can rebuild its pool and drive metrics. Note that DrivePool will still perform its own balancing (if set) afterwards. But personally I'd want to sort out whatever's causing the drives to drop out before trying this.
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Personally I use Everything by Voidtools; I also know of UltraSearch by JAM and SwiftSearch by wfunction. So long as your drives either have letters or mount paths they can quickly find files across multiple drives.
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Correct, at least based on my own past experiences.
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DrivePool's duplication in real-time mode shouldn't have a problem; the performance hit is quite small. Schedule-based duplication may or may not be problematic depending on camera outputs vs drive/connection performance (e.g. will there be issues with recording streams to a drive if previous recordings on the drive are also being read). Also schedule-based duplication will not duplicate any files that are being held open for writing at the time).
Other concerns that come to mind:
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Free space of drives versus free space of pool. The pool reports the combined free space to Windows/apps, but any given file is limited to the free space of the drive being written to - e.g. if your app needs to record 2TB of video to the pool as a single file and the drives in the pool have 3TB combined free but only 1TB free on any given drive then the app will unexpectedly run out of space; some apps don't handle this well. However if you can know the largest recording will be X size (e.g. maybe the app has a splitting option) then you can set the pool to fill each drive to less than capacity-X to avoid this problem.
- In the event of a drive in a pool failing completely/suddenly, DrivePool switches that pool to read-only to prevent potential file conflicts; this is not optimal if you're wanting the (other) cameras using that pool to continue recording. You may wish to consider multiple pools (e.g. one per X cameras)* and/or a pool consisting of (via software or hardware) multiple RAID1 mirrored pairs, RAID5 striped sets or similar, so that in the event of drive failure(s) an affected pool can remain writable while using Scanner or similar to notify you of the failure.
*This may also be desirable depending on the bandwidth required by the cameras plus any expected maintenance / user operations versus the speed of the drives.
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Free space of drives versus free space of pool. The pool reports the combined free space to Windows/apps, but any given file is limited to the free space of the drive being written to - e.g. if your app needs to record 2TB of video to the pool as a single file and the drives in the pool have 3TB combined free but only 1TB free on any given drive then the app will unexpectedly run out of space; some apps don't handle this well. However if you can know the largest recording will be X size (e.g. maybe the app has a splitting option) then you can set the pool to fill each drive to less than capacity-X to avoid this problem.
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Licenses linked to stablebit cloud can be reassigned via the cloud portal without needing to deactivate a stablebit app manually (e.g. before a windows reinstall).
Otherwise you need to manually deactivate the app first or - e.g. if windows falls over and can't get up - you may need to contact stablebit support to have them release the license.
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I would suggest using the official plugin until the issue re-occurs and then follow the directions at https://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Log_Collection to create a log of it happening to send to StableBit and open a support ticket.
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Are you using the official SSD Optimizer plugin or the user-made All-In-One plugin? Does it make any difference trying the other one?
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FWIW, digging through Microsoft's documentation, I found these two entries in the file system protocols specification:
In short, if a file system cannot provide a file ID that is both unique within a given volume and stable until deleted, then it must set the field to either zero (indicating the file system does not support file IDs) or maxint (indicating the file system cannot given a particular file a unique ID) as per the specification.
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I can see the "missing" disk in the list of non-pooled disks so I would normally guess the metadata that basically says "this disk has a poolpart X that belongs to pool Y" was somehow corrupted; seeing as the poolpart folder is also not showing up in Explorer with show hidden files activated and I notice there seems to be two $RECYCLE.BIN root folders being shown in WizTree my suspicion is the filesystem corruption on that disk is more extensive than just that.
If the "missing" disk contains only fully backed/duplicated data, then given the other file system issues on that disk I would format that disk and if that completes okay then "Remove" the "missing" disk from the pool and re-add it from the list of non-pooled disks so that DrivePool can rebuild the poolpart from duplication / you can restore from backup.
If however the "missing" disk contains non-duplicated non-backed data that you wish to recover, then I would see if you can use WizTree to copy your data out of the poolpart folder to a temporary location on a good disk before formatting/removing/adding as above, and then copying the saved data back into the pool after checking it's okay (maybe run a content comparison check between the pool and the saved data).
Regarding the duplication warning, that would be referencing a different disk (as the "missing" disk isn't currently part of the pool) even if the problem may stem from the same original issue that made the disk go "missing", so would need to be tackled separately.
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If you don't already have a backup of your pool, I'd recommend making one and then seeing if a chkdsk /scan /v reveals anything (if you haven't already tried that).
Given it's not even working on a new empty folder I don't know what else to try; if you don't want to recreate the pool just yet (whether by manually moving the content in the poolparts or restoring from backup), I'd suggest contacting StableBit so they can troubleshoot it.
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DrivePool itself doesn't care about the drive letters or mount paths of the volumes that make up a pool; if you do a bare metal reinstall of Windows and DrivePool then DrivePool should simply detect the poolparts from the previous install and recreate the pool drive.
If you're using externally-powered bays for your pool, I would simply use mountvol to note which volumes are linked to which bay positions, shutdown, power the bays off, do the bare metal install of Windows 10, power them on, remove the drive letters that Windows creates for them, install DrivePool, it should recreate the pool, then you can give it the drive letter you want and recreate the mount paths for the individual volumes.
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It could be the folder metadata (permissions, alternate streams, etc) have been corrupted on one or both of the drives; Windows won't necessarily pick that up. As a quick attempt at a workaround, I would try moving the folder's content into a new folder and if that works, see if you can turn on duplication for the new folder. If you can, the issue is with the old folder itself and you could just delete the old folder and rename the new one with the old one's name. If you can't, then the issue is likely a subfolder or file within the folder, which you could narrow down.
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Yeah, I forgot robocopy has gotten some updates since 2011, that might be why?
Disk Management's disk numbering does not have guaranteed persistence across OS or hardware changes (and references the physical storage devices, which can each contain zero or more volumes).
Instead mountvol uses volume identifiers - in the format of \\?\Volume{dashed-alphanumeric-string}\ - that do have persistence even across different machines (as the volume identifiers are created with and stored in the volumes themselves).
So if your current tracking method involves Disk # then I would suggest using Volume ID (and/or your own custom unique Volume Label) instead for the changeover.
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I'm not aware of any way to upgrade (rather than replace) WHS2011 to W10.
If you have a folder - e.g. C:\DM - in which you have junctions to various drives in your pool (e.g. due to using Disk Management to mount the paths to the volumes) and wish to copy those junctions to another drive - e.g. E:\DM - then one option is to use the following command to copy the junctions and anything else in the folder (bug: you may need to run it multiple times until all links appear) in an administrator prompt: robocopy C:\DM E:\DM /mir /sj /sl
Note however that the above method will not update Disk Management with the copied junctions as mounted paths; if you want Disk Management to show the junctions as mounted paths then I suggest instead using the mountvol command to list all current volumes and their mounts, then use that output to create a batch file using mkdir and mountvol with the appropriate parameters to recreate those mount paths on the new system. You will need to run this as an Administrator.
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Yes, if you're relying on Snapraid's ability to rebuild from a drive failure then you should disable Scanner evacuation in DrivePool.
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One of the plugins might be responsible; does (temporarily) disabling all balancing plugins have any effect?
If not, I'd suggest opening a support ticket with StableBit.
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I'm... not sure? Having checked my own installs I still get the normal Notification settings but it seems like they might also be stuck in an expired trial of Cloud plus. But it wouldn't feel right that linking to the Cloud would reduce the individual functionality of the desktop app either. @Christopher (Drashna) is Bazzu85's issue "functioning as designed" or "not as planned"?
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Try re-adding your email address in the app and using the Test button?
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I was using Chrome when I checked. Interesting, Chrome is still good but I get your page when I try Firefox instead.
Doing some digging... at least on mine, looks like ad blocking is tripping things up. Specifically, stablebit.cloud makes a call to https://stablebit.cloud/lib/sentry/bundle.min.js with a build number and "/sentry/bundle.min.js" is denied by default by uBlock origin (due to that script being in the EasyPrivacy filter list that ublock origin makes use of); permitting that script allows the page to load.
stablebit.cloud also makes a call to q.stripe.com/csp-report that uBlock origin denies by default but stablebit.cloud still completes loading.
So if you wish to access the site you could try disabling ad-blocking for stablebit.cloud or, if you're using ublock origin, you could use advanced filtering to specifically allow just 1st-party scripts or that script call in particular on stablebit.cloud.
Pinging @Christopher (Drashna) regarding this.
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Just tried, seems to be working here?
You can also check https://status.stablebit.cloud/ if it happens again for you to see whether the problem is at StableBit's end.
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Note that if "File placement rules respect real-time file placement limits set by the balancing plug-ins" is not checked then any file that triggers a File Placement rule - even if the rule just says "this can go to any disk" - will be ignored by OFP.
Given your 2nd edit however, it looks like Ordered File Placement isn't working properly. I'd recommend opening a support ticket with StableBit.
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Something to try #1: Ensure that Balance Immediately is selected, Automatic Balancing - Triggers is set to 100% / 1 GB and enable only the Duplication Space Optimizer balancer (plus Scanner is okay if you've got that). Re-balance; DSO having complete priority should get DP back on track and you can then return to your regular preferences.
Something to try #2: In the GUI, from the Cog icon go to Troubleshooting then Reset all settings... and then set your preferred configuration and try #1 again.
If that doesn't work, it's possible the balancing metadata for the pool might have somehow borked. At this point I'd recommend opening a support ticket with StableBit so that they can investigate/fix the problem.
Alternatively, you could try replacing the pool. The following instructions presume that (1) you have a current backup in case something goes (more) wrong, (2) you don't have or don't want to use spare drives to copy your data from the problem pool to a new pool, and (3) you are not using any symlinks, junctions or third-party system-attribute content to/in the pool (if you are, you will have to resolve those appropriately):
- If disabled, enable hidden (but not system) folders viewing in Windows.
- Stop the DrivePool service and close any open programs/files in the pool.
- Rename the hidden poolpart.uidstring folder on each drive in the pool by prepending "old" or similar (e.g. rename "poolpart.1234" to "oldpoolpart.1234").
- Start the DrivePool service. In the GUI, the drives should all show up as missing. Remove the "missing" drives until the pool is gone.
- Create a new replacement pool with those drives. Set up your preferred balancing, placement, duplication, etc.
- Stop the DrivePool service again.
- On each drive, move the contents of the xpoolpart folder to the newly created poolpart folder (do not move system folders - if it asks, skip them).
- Start the DrivePool service again.
- In the GUI, Manage Pool -> Re-measure and Cog Icon -> Recheck Duplication.
- Once you're happy that everything's showing up in the "new" pool, delete the "oldpoolpart" folders (do NOT delete the new "poolpart" folders) and optionally re-disable the hidden folders viewing in Windows.
If you do that and it still didn't work, please lodge a support ticket with StableBit as something is messed up.
Any way to "force" DrivePool to balance?
in General
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Each drive (technically each volume) has only one poolpart, so you only need to worry about what comes after the poolpart.longhexname section in the path (the exampleX vs exampleY).
If Windows is seeing the drive as write-protected then it might not be possible to move the files off it (copy yes, move no). You might try using diskpart as an administrator to list volume and then select volume # to select the volume, then use the attributes disk command to see whether the readonly flag has been set on the disk, and attempt to clear it if so (attributes disk clear readonly) before using exit to exit diskpart. Another possibility is that the file system on the drive has been corrupted in a way that Windows can't fix without formatting the drive.