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Designate target disk(s) with file protection/duplication?


JasonC

Question

With the duplication feature, is it possible to designate the target disks? I ended up having a Windows upgrade garble all the disks in an enclosure, so duplication wouldn't really help me if the duplicates were on disks all in that enclosure/connected to that controller.

Thanks!

 

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There are at least two methods to do this.

  1. Simplest method would be to create a separate pool for each grouping of disks (e.g. "enclosure A disks" and "enclosure B disks") then create a super-pool consisting of those pools and turn on duplication just for the super-pool (my preference).
  2. If you want more granular control, you could use the Ordered File Placement balancer and stagger the Duplicated placement priority with disks inside and outside the enclosure.

You could also combine the two methods (e.g. use a super-pool for duplication and then use the OFP balancer for fine control of each of the sub-pools).

Since the balancer algorithm can occasionally run into issues, if you just want guaranteed fire-and-forget I'd go with the first method.

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Let me see if I under stand this correctly, I might be in the same boat as JasonC. I just build my new home sever and populated it with new disks. I have moved all my data from the old server. The drives in the old server are old but some of them might still be ok to use just not the drive I would want my original copy of data on. So im trying to rotate my disks like this: New / Duplicate / Trash. I want to label the older disks for use as duplication only. so I can still suck some life out of them before I upgrade those also.

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The way DrivePool's duplication works there isn't really an "original" and a "copy" of a file, the file just exists on two or more drives at the same time (exception: if real-time duplication isn't turned on, the file starts off only on one drive until the next scheduled duplication pass).

You can use the Ordered File Placement balancer (OFP) to fill drives in a pool in a certain order, so long as there's room to do so. So a file might end up on drive 1 and 2, or 1 and 3, or 2 and 3, etc, but OFP can't ensure a file exists on two particular separate groups of drives. OFP can use separate priority lists for non-duplicated and duplicated files, so you could have non-duplicated and duplicated files filling the drives of a pool in different directions.

You can use the Drive Usage Limiter balancer (DUL) to place files only on certain drives, so long as there's room to do so. Like the OFP, the DUL can be set to restrict non-duplicated and duplicated files differently but can't ensure a file exists on separate groups of drives.

If however what you want is to ensure that a group of drives never holds the only copies of your files? Use a super-pool to duplicate the files (and/or have backups).

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