External USB Hard Drives and Cloud Backup

[TomT]

Hello. I am interested in the three products, Scanner, DrivePool, and CloudDrive. I would like to know if this culd be possible with them.

We have a Windows file server, and what I would like to do is

• Connect several external USB hard drives to the server, and make one large pooled drive.
• I want to back up data in the pooled drive to the cloud, such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, FTP.

Because my eternal USB hard drives are not brand new, I believe the scanner is essential in conjunction with DrivePool. Am I correct?

How can I configure automatic backup from the local pooled drive to the cloud? Maybe, I can create two pooed drives, one is local using the external USB drives, and another is cloud pooled drive using my cloud services?

Can the duplicate function work between pools? Or, duplication work only within folders in the same pooled drive?

In summary, I would like our staff to save data into the shared folder on the local pooled drive, and it should be duplicated to the cloud in real-time.

If anybody knows if those are possible or if you can help me to understand how these three products work,  any comment is appreciated.

Thank you very much.

[Shane]

"Because my eternal USB hard drives are not brand new, I believe the scanner is essential in conjunction with DrivePool. Am I correct?"

Scanner is good for detecting when drives are going bad, and DrivePool can detect Scanner's warnings to attempt to evacuate a bad drive to the rest of its pool before it fails. Both can also be configured to provide email (or with the paid cloud service, or via third party tools, push/SMS notifications) alerts.

"How can I configure automatic backup from the local pooled drive to the cloud? Maybe, I can create two pooed drives, one is local using the external USB drives, and another is cloud pooled drive using my cloud services?"

That would be an option, yes. You could then use a third-party tool to perform the backups from the local pool to the cloud pool.

"Can the duplicate function work between pools? Or, duplication work only within folders in the same pooled drive?

Duplication settings are per-pool (optionally per-folder within a pool). If you wished to have DrivePool duplicate "across" pools, you could create (for example) a "main pool", a "local pool" (consisting of your USB drives) and a "cloud pool" (consisting of your cloud drive*), add the local and cloud pools to the main pool, and then turn on duplication for the main pool (on which you would store your data). This would result in the main pool storing duplicates in the local pool and cloud pool storage devices. Note however that this would be a "mirror", not a "backup".

*a cloud drive consists of both the remote storage service and a local cache drive (the latter acts as a buffer).

"In summary, I would like our staff to save data into the shared folder on the local pooled drive, and it should be duplicated to the cloud in real-time."

Note that "real-time" will always be throttled by the speed (and availability) of your internet connection, so I would recommend duplication on the local pool as well for local redundancy, and if what you are actually wanting is a "backup" rather than a "mirror" then I suggest using a third-party tool to backup the local pool to the cloud pool.

Also, be aware that in the event of a sudden drive loss DrivePool will respond by switching affected pool(s) to read-only mode until the issue is addressed (e.g. removing it from its pool) to prevent data corruption; to mitigate this an option is to add drives to your pool as pairs of RAID1 mirrors, such that a minimum of two drives would have to fail before the pool switched to read-only mode.

For whatever it's worth, I know of a practice that has been using a DrivePool+Scanner setup for some years now, with hourly local snapshots via File History and nightly remote backups via FreeFileSync (EDIT: making use of FFS's versioning function). They seem happy enough (and the setup has kept their data intact despite the occasional drive failure and accidental "oops deleted the wrong folder" events).

Edited February 13 by Shane
clarification

[TomT]

Wow! Thank you so much! You answered all my questions. I will get their software and try them out.

Best regards,