fattipants2016

I tested again, and it's still broken, but I think it may have to do with my 2 of my member disks being partitions on the same physical disk. I'm going to rearrange my stuff and try again in a few days.

Not me who created a ticket, actually. Not in some time. It's going to be quite a bit of work right now to recreate the problem, because all of my file placement rules have to change with/without SSD optimizer. This is definitely not the expected behavior, before I try? This is the basic setup: E:\Videos\Movies (disk 1-5) E:\Videos\TV (disk 1) E:\Music (disk 2) E:\Games (disk 3) E:\Videos\*\*.srt (disk 5) E:\Videos\*\*.nfo (disk 5) E:\Videos\*\*.jpg (disk 5) Basically, music and TV are kept isolated on single disks to prevent an album / show stretching across more than 1. Movies go wherever / fill in gaps. Small files (like subtitles and metadata) are kept seperate (disk 5) which is backed up with Acronis. Files written to existing folders seem to follow the rules, while new subfolders and their contents ignore their parent folders rules until I balance the next time.

If, say, E:\Music is placed on drive 1, new files added to this folder are appropriately written to drive 1. If I create a new folder E:\Music\Test, it's written to the most empty drive, ignoring file placement rules (and then moved during balancing.) Is there any work around for this? My backup strategies rely on certain directories only falling on particular disks.

The most foolproof solution I've found is to move your archival storage to a dedicated machine, and create a network share with WORM access. I fooled around with Windows 10 'Controlled Folder Access' and it was a constant headache, having to constantly add allowances for new software. I re-purposed an ageing Gigabyte Brix mini-PC as a headless NAS, and it's powerful enough to run DrivePool and a handful of other web-based tools.

You can run snapraidhelper (on CodePlex) as a scheduled task to test, sync, scrub and e-mail the results on a simple schedule. If you like, you can even use the "running file" drivepool optionally creates while balancing to trigger it. Check my post history.

Would it be possible to start storing balancing and file placement settings on the pool disks themselves? Over the year or so I've been using DP, my configuration has grown pretty complex. Small errors in configuration can cause huge amounts of data to be moved around, and cause big problems with snapraid.

1.) Is there any way to override the default 3x duplication for reparse points? They're stored on my C Drive (I know, I know) which is backed up once a week. 2.) Are files verified when they're balanced? Is that why my poor drives are pegged at 100% utilization? Again, any way to turn this off?

Don't you mean 'false,' to make it use foreground IO? I just saw this advice in another thread, as well.

Scratch this question, in 2.2.934 the quota is working exactly as expected. It shows not needing balanced until the GB quota is hit. Don't know if maybe there was something wrong with my balancing settings in the past, or a bug in a previous version. I've never understood how the 'balancing ratio' quota and 'or this much data needs to be moved' GB quota interact. Will having a GB quota set (say, 25GB) ignore the ratio (which nobody seems to understand, entirely) until 25GB needs to be moved? The balancing ratio is basically broken / unusable when file placement rules are being used, because it basically drops to 0 as soon as you violate one.

I run double parity, also. It's 1/2 for peace of mind and 1/2 because I'm a nerd and multiple parity is seriously cool stuff. Worked great! I've simulated a few scenarios in the past by moving files to another disk, but this was the first time I needed it. I couldn't leave well enough alone, though, and finally found a solution that works Even with write-protected folders. From an administrator-level command prompt type: "Robocopy C:\Test C:\Test /B /S /Move" I don't understand exactly why it works, but you're basically moving a folder onto itself, but skipping (deleting) empty folders. /B allows Robocopy to properly set attributes and permissions for system folders like Recycle Bin and .covefs. Bad stuff happens if you don't use it. I wrote a batch to run this script on all 7 of my Drivepool disks, and it completes in under a minute. Good stuff.

I tried this, and it doesn't work. Remove Empty Directories does not support junction points. And Windows 10 constantly nags you about a 'driver error' if you have disks mounted to folders but not letters. Wrong thread? I got to test SnapRAID earlier when a wonky script deleted ~4,000 files before I could stop it, so until someone comes along with something new to try I'm done. And this ^^, BTW, is why anyone using snapRAID without file placement rules is absolutely nuts. If those files had been scattered across different drives there's 0 chance I would have been able to get them back.

That's a fair point. I abandoned mounting my drives to folder paths for reasons I don't entirely remember, but I may revisit this if I can't resolve my "Downloads" permission issue.

I think the one I'm using is long abandoned. It was actually hosted at the article I found called "7 Tools To Find And Delete Empty Folders in Windows" There's a website inside the help file, but it's no-more. I'm not familiar enough with the rules of this board, but the program's only 37KB so someone could upload it as an attachment for posterity. All excitement aside, however, the program successfully deletes all of my empty folders EXCEPT the Downloads folder, and I cannot figure out why. Downloads is my most common empty-culprit, and also the most commonly accessed / troublesome, so I'm trying to get to the bottom of it.

I found a command line program call rmempty, which you can call with a list of folders (the root of each DP disk) at one time. I simply wrote a batch file, which I scheduled to run at the same time as my SnapRAID sync each night, and now I never have to think about it again. It works in seconds, BTW. I had to verify that it did anything with Remove Empty Directories afterwards, because I was sure it didn't work.

Thanks, Jaga. It was actually during one of my however-often-I-remember RED work-flows I thought to post the question, since running it on 7 different drives is painful.

Due to file placement rules, my DP member disks are riddled with empty folders. Folder A belongs on Drive A, Folder B on Drive B; if a file is moved from folder A to folder B, folder B is created on drive A, which is then empty after the next balancing pass. From this point forward, every time you open or interact with folder B, both drives A and B spin up because drive A still has an empty folder B on it. Can anyone think of any clever ways to keep this scenario from happening, or automate the removal of these empty folders? I tried telling programs to move the files to the physical drive location in the above situation, but this starts confusing DP on pretty short order.

I've certainly no idea what SABnzbd is, but I'd personally configure DP & SR to run at the same time each night, and configure your DL client to pause your download or post-processing queues for however long it typically takes. Simple = Good And I personally use the SSD Optimizer plugin for DP, so even if files get added to the pool while SR is running, they simply get placed on the SSD, which SR doesn't care about, until the next balancing pass.

I only have experience with your second question. If you figure out Q1 you could probably just use it to trigger my solution to Q2. 1.) enable drivepool's runningfile option 2.) use bigteddy's FileSystemWatcher script (available on technet) to monitor for the removal of the runningfile you've configured, and write an event 3.) use the event-log entry you set up to trigger snapraid via a scheduled task (in a nutshell, DP will create a dummy file while it's balancing and remove it when it's done. You can use the removal of this file to trigger SR) Some notes: 1. ) the filesystem watcher eats up some i/o, so I still recommend you schedule it and define a max. runtime - If you let it run all the time, it will also trigger snapraid every time DP does any routine checks, not just balancing 2.) I recommend configuring snapraid-helper (from codeplex) rather than calling snapraid from command-line - it will check for a user-defined number of missing files prior to sync, and e-mail you so you can decide what to do - you can also have it email you with a list of added / removed / updated / restored files after every sync if you so desire. I'd never touched powershell prior to configuring the scenaro above, and now I use it for all kinds of cool stuff. It's worth giving it a go. I made quite a few posts, here, while trying to get it working. they might be useful

That should do nicely. Thank you.

As long as #2 is loaded into memory, no complaints here. #1 was for a possible scheme I had to replace a scheduled backup of certain files with duplication, but I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.

In the ordered file placement / SSD optimizer Drive prioritization, I'd like the option to have 2 or more disks equally weighted. I'd like the folder "cool stuff" to be equally balanced across disks 1 and 2, but if both disks are above the set threshold, start filling up drive 3. Drive 3 is a spare that should otherwise stay empty. Right now, to implement this feature, one disk needs to be filled at a time, which isn't ideal for snapraid (or Drivepool duplication for that matter.) If there's a combination of plugins, or a registry hack that will make this happen let me know!

Just a few quick questions. 1.) If a folder is duplicated on 2 or more drives, is there a way to dictate which copy / drive the system accesses routinely (say an SSD rather than spinning disk?) 2.) Are the contents of the [metadata] folder that are 3x duplicated by default anything that drives would actually be spun up to access? If so, is there a way to force them to be read / stored on a SSD?

I recently encountered a performance issue when pointing Acronis True Image at a drivepool folder, rather than it's physical location. I knew Drivepool could act up with certain virus and de-dupe software, but was unaware that backup software could have similar ill effects. Are there any additional times when I should be sure to side-step DrivePool, and point programs / services directly at the physical disk? Thank you.

I wonder if there could be an incompatibility between Drivepool and however you have your network drives mounted? In a tangentially related anecdote, I once used Teracopy to move my entire <file> collection to an unmapped NAS (using UNC path) and the files were just GONE. Never appeared on my NAS, unrecoverable on my local disk. Gone. If nobody from the team chimes in, please contact support and let us know what they say. That's scary stuff.

Does the drive still appear to be formatted? Or did it complain that you needed to format the disk prior to use? I've encountered this back when I was using cheap-o eSata controllers and port multipliers, and I had luck doing a partition recovery. If you've reformatted the drive it may already be too late.