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From snapraid parity to Drivepool duplication...


xamandre

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Hi all, seeking a little advice here : 

with the release of amazon cloud drive i'm now testing it with clouddrive, added it to the pool and setup the disk as the target of pool-duplication. Drivepool is still uploading stuff now,i will have with a 1:1 copy in a few days.

I have some questions regarding disasters (i'm coming to a snapraid-parity configuration that i wanna leave to regain my big 8tb disk) :

 

1 - If a disk is missing, drivepool will set everything as read-only until i remove and then add a new drive to the pool. Drivepool will then copy the missing stuff from the amazon cloud drive. No data lost. Is this right ?

 

2 - What happens if i accidentally delete a folder or file from the pool ? Can i restore it from the duplication ?

 

3 -  What is the easiest way to save file history of a part of my pool (duplicated to the cloud too) ? I'm scared of ransomware and do not wanna use other users or set everything as read-only (yes i'm a lazy ass eheh)

 

OT : i'm planning to re-install my windows 10 pro after all is setup to have a clean pc...can i just install all stablebit software with my keys ? I use all 3 products :)

 

Thanks a lot

 

A.

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  1. The pool is set as "read only" until you remove the missing disk.  Once that happens, it goes back to normal. 

    And once you've removed the disk, the software checks to the pool, to see if it needs to rebalance or reduplicate data. And it does this automatically, and for any drive.  

     

    So if everything is duplicated, then you'll be fine, but it will want to reduplicate the data to another disk, if there are more than one left. 

     

  2. If you delete a file or folder on the pool, it is deleted on all of the disks.  Both copies are removed.  

     

  3. There isn't a great answer for this.

     

    The best answer is "Cold storage". An offline and/or off site backup of the data that is not always online. 

     

    That means copy the files from the pool to a USB drive or a CloudDrive, and then unmount/disconnect the drive. 

     

    Setting a drive as read only doesn't always work, as it's a very simple process to bypass or change this. Physical disconnection is the BEST way. 

     

  4. Deactivate the software first, then reinstall and reactivate on the new install.  That's it. :)
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Thanks for the answers :

 

2 - Anything i can do to avoid this ? Maybe a delay on the duplication process ?

 

3 - I can use amazon cloud drive as cold storage, but not duplication in real-time with drivepool (and it's soooo handy ehhe) that way i think because i need to remove the drive from the pool right ?

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2 - Anything i can do to avoid this ? Maybe a delay on the duplication process ?

 

No. We don't differentiate original from copies, so doing so could potentially cause issues with data integrity. What file do we modify first? Which is the correct file?   So stuff like this is done to all files in parallel, ensuring that it's always in sync.  

 

The alternative is to use two drives without the pool and a syncing utility (such as Microsoft SyncToy, Free File Sync, Good Sync, Allways Sync, etc) to keep the contents in sync. 

 

 

3 - I can use amazon cloud drive as cold storage, but not duplication in real-time with drivepool (and it's soooo handy ehhe) that way i think because i need to remove the drive from the pool right ?

 

Yes and no.  Technically yes, but in reality, not really. 

 

Meaning, you shouldn't.  Use a sync utility (or drag and drop). 

 

 

That said, you *can* use DrivePool.  Unmount the disk in CloudDrive. This should cause it to show up as "missing" in StableBit DrivePool.  Remove it. 

 

When you remount the CLoudDrive disk, it will automatically be re-added to the pool, since *it* was not marked as removed. (we store a flag on the PoolPart folder to mark as "removed."  

When the disk is re-added, it will recheck the pool and reduplicate files as needed. 

 

 

This method is a bit hacky and may run into issues (with used files and the like). But it should work. 

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I'm starting to think that the easiest way for me should be something like :

 

- remove the amazon cloud drive from the pool

- use something like freefilesync to mirror my drivepool to it

- after that launch freefilesync as scheduled task to mirror differences from the pool

- in case of a disk loss i can just compare the 2 disks with freefilesync and just copy the missing folders/files back after adding a new to drivepool

Another step i can take is to launch a batch after the sync to set everything read-only on the mirror to maybe avoid ransomware 

 

Do you think that should work well ? Is that really a better plan for my needs compared to drivepool's duplication ? I really fear the mess coming from a disk loss with drivepool trying to copy duplicated data around my free space without asking me anything. I wanna be able to add a new disk, add it to the pool and start the sync manually

 

EDIT : Is there a software out there similar to freefilesync that is keeping versioning like crashplan ? 

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I'm investigating my options from moving from my current setup of everything duplicated locally with some folders backed up by Crashplan, to something that will give me more free space...

 

Btw doing a restore from Crashplan is a nightmare when you have files spread randomly over the disk pool! I am going to create a separate thread on that is there isn't one already (just joined the forum).

 

I have heard of some people using Duplicati to backup to Amazon - it looks like it does incremental backups with history, so take a look!

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I'm testing now clouddrive + freefilesync to mirror my pool to amazon cloud drive.

I can say that the speed is really good compared to crashplan.

Sadly i do not know why but the download is throttled to 50mbit inside clouddrive, maybe an api problem

 

What are you using Clouddrive for if you are using FFS to mirror?

 

Im also looking for a solution to mirror my pool...I was thinking of using Goodsync to sync directly to Clouddrive but i dont like the fact that i can only access my data via clouddrive. So if im away and i need a file that is in the clouddrive on my Gdrive, im kind  of screwed.

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I think I will be using Cloudberry. Other options are Arq, Cloudbacko, Duplicati and SyncBackPro.

 

A simple mirror/sync is not reliable as a backup. What if you delete stuff or get shafted by ransomware? The changes would just be mirrored to Amazon Cloud and you would be stuck without another offline backup.

 

The ones I listed keep a file history to work round this. Cloudberry also does cloud-to-cloud backups so I can backup my OneDrive to Amazon with full file history too. The basic version is free too, but it looks like you have to pay for the next level up if you want to install it on a server OS. Worth it though!

 

When a pooled drive goes down with unduplicated files you may end up with a random dispersal of missing files, so you need a restore option that can restore just missing files rather than restore EVERYTHING or having to manually select each missing file. Looks like Clouberry can do this, Arq and Cloudbacko cannot; not tried the last two yet.

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