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Drive pool just destroyed years of data and formatted over 14TB!


PhoenixEvo

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Drive pool just destroyed years and years of data, I had 14TBs of data that is now gone! All I did was try to add a drive to my array and poof, everything is gone and looks like the drives formatted!

 

Can someone please help me. I cant use a restore point for that much data and i dont have file protection for the same reason. 

 

I trusted this product with my data and they just burned me.

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It's terrible to lose data. Having said that, I don't follow what your situation is. I have never had any data lost from adding a HDD to DrivePool. 

Is it your Drive D that you believe was formatted? That's the only drive that appears to have no data.

On the top left corner of the Pie Chart DrivePool main page, you have 3 messages logged. You might want to click on that small pie chart and read what DrivePool has logged. Sometimes that gives you clues.

Is there a reason you added your Drive C to your DrivePool? I know it's possible to add Drive C to DrivePool, but I personally never use my Drive C for any pools. I try to keep that Drive C from outside storage programs.

As far as trusting DrivePool, well, it works better for me than my old hardware RAID setups, or when I used Windows Storage Spaces. I had massive data loses with a single HDD failure in both those other systems. In fact, even though I had triple redundancy on my Windows Storage Spaces, I had a single HDD failure and it destroyed my entire Storage Space volume. That was not supposed to happen.

I switched over to DrivePool a couple years ago. I have had HDD failures using DrivePool, but it only affects the data on the failed HDD. Many times, I was able to physically remove the drive, plug it into a desktop caddy, and transfer almost all the data off that failing HDD. 

DrivePool is not a backup plan, but you can turn on duplication for the entire pool, or specific folders. In theory, that should allow you to rebuild your data faster when you add a new drive to the pool after a HDD failure. I find that useful for some data. Mostly, my DrivePool is used as my Home Media Server and I have all my data backed up on HDDs sitting in my closet. I mostly trust DrivePool to handle my server data, but like anything with computers, you really need to have a good backup plan to ensure no data loss if you have HDD failures. After running DrivePool for a couple of years, I only have single copies of media data on my DrivePool Home Media Server. If I lose a pool HDD, then I'll rebuild from my backup HDDs if still needed. 

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2 hours ago, gtaus said:

It's terrible to lose data. Having said that, I don't follow what your situation is. I have never had any data lost from adding a HDD to DrivePool. 

Is it your Drive D that you believe was formatted? That's the only drive that appears to have no data.

On the top left corner of the Pie Chart DrivePool main page, you have 3 messages logged. You might want to click on that small pie chart and read what DrivePool has logged. Sometimes that gives you clues.

Is there a reason you added your Drive C to your DrivePool? I know it's possible to add Drive C to DrivePool, but I personally never use my Drive C for any pools. I try to keep that Drive C from outside storage programs.

As far as trusting DrivePool, well, it works better for me than my old hardware RAID setups, or when I used Windows Storage Spaces. I had massive data loses with a single HDD failure in both those other systems. In fact, even though I had triple redundancy on my Windows Storage Spaces, I had a single HDD failure and it destroyed my entire Storage Space volume. That was not supposed to happen.

I switched over to DrivePool a couple years ago. I have had HDD failures using DrivePool, but it only affects the data on the failed HDD. Many times, I was able to physically remove the drive, plug it into a desktop caddy, and transfer almost all the data off that failing HDD. 

DrivePool is not a backup plan, but you can turn on duplication for the entire pool, or specific folders. In theory, that should allow you to rebuild your data faster when you add a new drive to the pool after a HDD failure. I find that useful for some data. Mostly, my DrivePool is used as my Home Media Server and I have all my data backed up on HDDs sitting in my closet. I mostly trust DrivePool to handle my server data, but like anything with computers, you really need to have a good backup plan to ensure no data loss if you have HDD failures. After running DrivePool for a couple of years, I only have single copies of media data on my DrivePool Home Media Server. If I lose a pool HDD, then I'll rebuild from my backup HDDs if still needed. 

So thank you! 

 

I did try to add my storage spaces pool to the drive pool when this happened. I know Microsoft sucks and it's also partially their fault and mine for not having redundancy but I truly can't afford redundancy yet. I'm saving for a whole server rework via unraid with redundancy by the end of this year but it will be a few thousand $ at least. I'm pretty amateur but I've already begun trying to find what I've lost and require it. I have CSV files of the content so I'm trying to make it work with radarr and sonarr to reaquire everything. I'm just struggling to make those excel docs with my stuff readable by those. If anyone knows of an automatic process to translate either text or excel files to a program that will allow me to reaquire please DM me. 

 

I tried a data recovery tool and that failed hard considering its striped across a bunch of disks lol.

 

 

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On 10/20/2022 at 11:02 AM, PhoenixEvo said:

I did try to add my storage spaces pool to the drive pool when this happened.

Yeah, I don't how you would do that. DrivePool uses NTFS on the drives, whereas Storage Spaces completely takes over the drives and strips the data to its pool of drives. I'm sure you could transfer the files out of Storage Spaces into DrivePool, but I don't think you could add Storage Spaces drives themselves into DrivePool. 

On 10/20/2022 at 11:02 AM, PhoenixEvo said:

I truly can't afford redundancy yet

Windows Storage Spaces can be set up without any redundancy. Problem is, you lose one drive, or even have a problem with one drive, then all your data is lost - forever. Been there, done that.

DrivePool is better for a no redundancy volume. If you have a problem with a failing drive, you might be able to transfer all the good files off the HDD before it completely dies. I had that happen a few times with some old HDDs. I hit a few bad sectors on a failing drive, but only lost a couple of files and the remaning files on the drive were able to be transferred off before complete failure. If you have a complete failure of a HDD, then you only lose files on that specific HDD. All the other drives in DrivePool are unaffected, whereas Windows Storage Spaces loses the entire volume because of the packet striping across all drives.

Having said that, DrivePool will split files in folders among different drives in an attempt to equalize storage space on the drives in the pool. For example, if you have a folder of an Artist - Greatest Hits, you might have one or two tracks on each HDD in the pool, depending on how many HDDs are in the pool. In that case, of a total HDD failure of one drive, you might lose a couple tracks from that Greatest Hits CD. For that reason, I always add .PAR2 files to my music folders which allows me to verify if all files are still intact in DrivePool, or if my MultiPar program can rebuild that folder, or if I have to reload that CD from my backups in storage.

If you have a limited number of folders that you would like to have duplication on, in DrivePool you can increase the number of copies stored down to the folder level. So, if you completely lost a drive in DrivePool, in theory, DrivePool should be able to rebuild those duplicated folders when it rebuilds. In reality, it actually worked for me, as I have a few folders in my DrivePool Home Media Server that I designated as duplicated and DrivePool rebuilt those lost files in the rebuild. That saves me time for those folders that I absolutely do not want to lose on my server.

I have not found a good program to catalog each individual drive in my pool where I don't have drive letters assigned to the drives. That would come in useful if you had a HDD failure, and then you call up the catalog and see what files you actually lost on that drive. But, I have 20 USB HDDs in my DrivePool and I don't have drive letters assigned to each drive. DrivePool does not require drives to have drive letters and not having drive letters to the DrivePool drives makes my Windows Explorer interface cleaner.

In short, I have found DrivePool to be much better for a no redundancy volume compared to Windows Storage Spaces. In any case, online server volumes should not be considered backups. You might not need redundancy on your online server files, but important data should have an offline or cloud backup. 

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Dear PhoenixEvo

I understand your plite.  I did the same thing.  I had my DrivePool active on my Windows 7 system.

I upgraded the OS to Windows 10.  I then looked into Storage Space.  The one thing I overlooked as the same happened to you.  Storage Spaces Low level formats all drives involved and deletes any hope of recovering the partition and the directory.  If you hadn't touched any of the drives,  It would be a perfect time to use Spinrite on each drive.  Spinrite is a utility available on grc.com.  It took me a while but I got ALL of my files back and the partition was restored.

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On 10/25/2022 at 5:17 AM, gtaus said:

I have not found a good program to catalog each individual drive in my pool where I don't have drive letters assigned to the drives. That would come in useful if you had a HDD failure, and then you call up the catalog and see what files you actually lost on that drive. But, I have 20 USB HDDs in my DrivePool and I don't have drive letters assigned to each drive.

Instead of assigning drive letters to your 20 USB disks, you could mount them in a folder. This means that the disks can be accessed individually at any time to catalogue or check their content, but they don't clutter up Windows File Explorer (since they appear as  subfolders of the C: drive). You can also CHKDSK the individual disks if needed. I have set up my drive pool in this way, although I have only 4 USB disks in the pool:

C:\Mount\Pool_1
C:\Mount\Pool_2
C:\Mount\Pool_3
C:\Mount\Pool_4

You specify the mount point on the Windows panel where you assign drive letters.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

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On 10/27/2022 at 4:30 PM, CyberSimian said:

Instead of assigning drive letters to your 20 USB disks, you could mount them in a folder. This means that the disks can be accessed individually at any time to catalogue or check their content, but they don't clutter up Windows File Explorer (since they appear as  subfolders of the C: drive). You can also CHKDSK the individual disks if needed. I have set up my drive pool in this way, although I have only 4 USB disks in the pool:

C:\Mount\Pool_1
C:\Mount\Pool_2
C:\Mount\Pool_3
C:\Mount\Pool_4

You specify the mount point on the Windows panel where you assign drive letters.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

That sounds like a much better solution to my problem than I have heard before. I have never mounted drives in a folder, but if I can catalog the individual drives in your type of setup, I will be switching over to that system. Thanks.

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On 10/27/2022 at 4:30 PM, CyberSimian said:

Instead of assigning drive letters to your 20 USB disks, you could mount them in a folder. This means that the disks can be accessed individually at any time to catalogue or check their content, but they don't clutter up Windows File Explorer (since they appear as  subfolders of the C: drive). You can also CHKDSK the individual disks if needed. I have set up my drive pool in this way, although I have only 4 USB disks in the pool:

C:\Mount\Pool_1
C:\Mount\Pool_2
C:\Mount\Pool_3
C:\Mount\Pool_4

You specify the mount point on the Windows panel where you assign drive letters.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

Just a quick follow up. I mounted all my DrivePool drives into a mount folder as you suggested, and it did indeed solve the issue of being able to catalog each drive. I had been trying to figure out a solution to that problem for a couple of years, and your method is easy to implement, and it works. Thank you very much for that suggestion.

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