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Mysterious "Other" Storage on the Drives of my Pool


nightstorm1994

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Hi.

 

I have a Pool of 4 Drives. Each of them have around 80-100GB of "Other" Storage on them.

There are no other Folders except the "PoolPart" hidden folder on those Drives.

After a bit of searching around I found out with "dpcmd check-pool-fileparts" that a lot of my Files have multiple Versions. That's a bit strange because I don't have Duplication activated.

I suspect that these Duplicates are the Files shown to me as "Other" in the Statistics. Re indexing the Files does not change the Statistic. Neither does the Rechecking of Duplicated Files.

Is there a easy way to clean those out?

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'Other' can be stuff associated with Windows or NTFS, not necessarily DrivePool itself.  Would be nice to have a way to get a list of the files or some details.

I would try moving some files to a non-pooled drive, then move them back. See if the 'other' amount goes down.

 

I found this elsewhere on the forum...

And then there's "Other". "Other" always confuses people, but it literally is everything else.
So what else is there?

  • Non-pooled files that exist on that disk. Remember that just because a disk is part of the pool doesn't mean that you can't continue to use that disk to store non-pooled files.
  • NTFS Metadata. For every file on a NTFS volume, there is additional metadata associated with that data stream, like the file name, file attributes, modification times, etc. These typically take very little disk space, but can add up if you have lots of files.
  • Directory entries. On NTFS, directory entries are actually stored as regular files with a "directory" attribute. But instead of a data stream, they contain a little database of index entries for each file (and subdirectory) that exists under them.
  • Slack space. Just because you have a 100GB volume, doesn't mean that you can use all 100 Gigabytes of that volume to store data. NTFS divides your volume into equally sized chunks called clusters, which are typically 4096 bytes in size. If your file doesn't fit neatly into these clusters then there's going to be some space at the end of the file that's wasted. We call this "slack space".
    For example, if you have a 2kb text file, it's going to use the full 4kb cluster, even if 2kb is empty space. Same goes with larger files that don't fill that last cluster, which is very common.
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I don't have an answer more a question. In my case I have 11.9TB duplicated and 5.1TB other. 

Could you detail a little more about dealing with previous versions.

Would this be done from the pooled drive or the individual spinner?

Today, I realized you had newer versions of DP so I just manually updated to 2.3.1.1448 from 2.2.5.1237. Automatic updates had not worked.

Also, I added 2 -2TB NVME M2 drives and set rebalance to 3 copies - strange thing is, the M2's seem to be ignored so far.

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Previous Versions, aka shadowcopies aka System Restor use the "System Volume Information" folder to save a snapshot of the files.   This happens only on the actual drives (not the pool drive), and counts as "other" data. 

You can disable this in the system properties, if you want, by running "SystemPropertiesProtection".  You can disable and delete the "protection" for these drives. 

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