Suitable for Small Business Point of Sale Software Redundancy?

[Alexander]

We use a point of sale software that uses a shared network folder to store all of it's data. This data lives in the C:\PointOfSale folder on our primary computer. Two other computers access this folder via a SMB share over our network. The files are very old school dBase databases.

We run daily backups (both to a NAS as well as a cloud storage provider), but we're looking to add more redundancy in case there is an SSD failure during the day and we lose a few hours of data (as the backups only run after hours).

I was curious if my understanding of DrivePool is correct and if my plan will work:

1. Add a second SSD to our primary computer (let's call it the D drive).
2. Set up folder duplication only for C:\PointOfSale to be duplicated to the D drive.
3. If the primary C drive fails, we would still have a full (and current) copy of our data on the D drive.

Would this scenario work with DrivePool? Any gotchas I should keep an eye out for?

Thanks!

[Shane]

DrivePool works by creating hidden poolpart folders on one or more drives (e.g. in your case C and D) and pooling them as a single virtual drive (e.g. P), so if the DB needs to be kept on literally C drive you wouldn't be able to directly go "hey DrivePool duplicate C:\PointOfSale to D:\PointOfSale".

You could however create a pool drive P from drives C and D, move the database to P:\PointOfSale and then in Windows create a directory symlink so the database still seems to be in C:\PointOfSale as far as your software is concerned.

Potential gotchas:

1. If you have to use a symlink because your database has to be in C:\something, some really old software doesn't work with symlinks. It's rare but something to test.
2. You'll need to use DrivePool's real-time duplication and not its scheduled-time duplication as the latter won't duplicate in-use files, but I gather the former is what you're wanting anyway.
3. Personally I would also make sure read striping is disabled, some old software doesn't play nice with that and I wouldn't risk it in a production environment without extensive testing first, but disabling it is as easy as unticking it in the Manage Pool -> Performance menu (if it's ticked in the first place).
4. Note that DrivePool's response to "a drive that's part of the pool has failed" is for the affected pool to go read-only until the failed drive is replaced or at least removed , though that's easy to do.

You might also want to look at backup software that supports VSS - i.e. able to take backups of files, folders or drives even when in use. Note that while VSS is not compatible with DrivePool directly it does work on poolpart folders, so if a 2x duplicated pool consisted of 2 poolpart drives then you'd only need to backup one of the poolparts.

[Alexander]

Thank you for the detailed response!
 

Quote

Note that DrivePool's response to "a drive that's part of the pool has failed" is for the affected pool to go read-only until the failed drive is replaced or at least removed , though that's easy to do.

I think this might be a dealbreaker unfortunately. Ideally I was hoping for something similar to RAID 1, where data is still readable/writable if one of the mirrored drives goes offline. I realize that it would be easy to remove a drive from the pool, but not everyone working at this business would have have skills to do that and that would result in downtime if the person with that knowledge wasn’t working at that time.

[Shane]

Yeah, to keep both read and write you'd have to go with RAID 1 (software or hardware based) to mirror a pair of drives. If your choice of RAID doesn't come with its own remote notifications but still allows per-drive SMART (e.g. Windows Pro software raid) you may wish to use StableBit's Scanner software so that if either drive dies or starts going bad it can send an email, app notification or SMS to let you/whoever know.