Recovery/Addition questions

[MichaelNC]

I have a question regarding recovery and also adding files to the drive pool.  

 

I have an old computer acting as a second non-resilient backup with all 7 SATA ports occupied with old HDD's that I'd like to get some use out of. If a drive starts to indicate imminent failure I can't add an additional drive to the system to manage this with DrivePool.  My question is could I just clone this drive in another system to a larger drive while I'm at it and then just replace the drive in the pool with this new drive?  If this can be done, can this be achieved with a simple copy?

 

Another scenario:

 

I understand that you can add a drive to the pool that already has files on it, but as I understand those files wouldn't be accessible via the DrivePool drive and would have to be accessed directly on that disk.  What would be the best way to get them added to the pool drive, do you just do a cut and paste to the pool drive and would that be a move operation since it's on the same disk or because it's going to a virtual drive result in a copy operation that would probably take significantly longer.  Alternately, could you just do the move directly on the disk to the DrivePool folder to make this a move operation?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

I believe that cloning the drive should work in this case, as long as both drives are not present in the same system at the same time.

But you'd be better just copying the contents of the drive to the new disk, on another system in this case.  (it's a bit more complicated than that, as you'd want to copy the contents of the hidden "poolpart" to the new disk, add that to the pool, and move the contents into the newly created "Poolpart" folder).

 

However, depending on the system, you could add a controller card to the system, to add more SATA connections.  This may solve the issue you're having with "space".

 

Also, depending on how much free space you have, you could remove a problem drive (or even just a smaller drive), as long as there is enough free space on the pool.

[MichaelNC]

Thanks, so just to understand how the system works, do I have to copy files that were already on a disk prior to being added to a drivepool  to the drivepool virtual drive or can I just move them to the drive pool directory on the local disk and drivepool would pick then pick them up as being on the drivepool dirve then?  Is this supported?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

The files that were already on the disk will be outside of the pool structure and will remain untouched. 

 

And yes, you can move the files into the PoolPart folder structure and they'll be added to the pool that way. In fact, we have a "seeding" guide for how to do this specifically:

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q4142489

 

But you do need to manually remeasure the pool when doing this, otherwise, it won't properly handle the files (balance and duplicate). Once it's remeasured, it will immediately start duplicating and balancing, as needed.