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Crashplan restore is a nightmare if using default Drivepool placement!


dannybuoy

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Hi, just a heads up for anyone that might not have ever had to do a restore yet...

 

I had a pooled drive go down recently, it totally died and would no longer be recognised. Because of this, I now had random files missing throughout the pool as they were spread randomly and balanced by Drivepool.

 

The only way I could figure out to restore this mess was to:

  • Open Crashplan UI, set to include deleted files, then hit the date column to sort by decending date.
  • Navigate through the tree in the Crashplan UI, and tick everything that is grey with a deleted date of the day the disk died. This is quicker via the keyboard using arrows and spacebar.
  • Spend an hour or so ticking files until you get tired, hit restore, remember where you where, then repeat until complete.

This took me ages as you can imagine. If only Crashplan could show me files deleted on a specific date and just restore those!

 

Since then I have tweaked my file placement settings to put music on one drive, pictures on another, etc. This way if it happens again I will have an easier time. Except that this requires manual management, and intervention once the disks get full to re-arrange stuff.

 

What might help here is a new balancer/placement plugin to keep all files in a subfolder together on the same drive? Food for thought for anyone out there into writing them. I'd also be interested to hear if anyone else has run into this and found a better way of dealing with it than I did!

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What might help here is a new balancer/placement plugin to keep all files in a subfolder together on the same drive? Food for thought for anyone out there into writing them. I'd also be interested to hear if anyone else has run into this and found a better way of dealing with it than I did!

 

The Ordered File Placement balancer plugin does try to keep subfolders together. But this is mainly by filling one disk at a time. 

 

 

Also, were you backing up the pool directly, or the disks in the pool?

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I did just back up just my logical Drivepool. Let me explain:

 

I have a P: drive for my pool, which in reality is 4 drives. Over time when I used the pool, files were spread randomly in a balanced fashion. Then a disk dies; because the files were spread randomly, random files are now missing from the pool.

 

Crashplan allows me to select exactly what I want to restore. I don't want to select to restore everything as there is no 'do not overwrite existing files' option, and I'm not going to restore multiple terabytes unnecessarily if I only have a few GB of files gone. If I only want to restore the actual missing files I have to work out what is missing and select them individually, this is what took me several days of agony.

 

Anyway, I have just been testing various cloud backup solutions now that Amazon offer unlimited Cloud Drive storage:

  • Cloudberry
  • Arq
  • Cloubacko
  • Duplicati
  • SyncBackPro

Arq and Cloudbacko are similarly restrictive in restore options. Haven't tried the last two yet. But after trying Cloudberry I don't think I'll even bother!

 

Cloudberry looks amazing, great UI, tons of options including the 'do not overwrite existing files' option I was desperately seeking from Crashplan. With this I should be able to just select the entire root and restore the lot and it will just retrieve the missing stuff rather than everything. It's very light on CPU and RAM and the upload is saturating my bandwidth at 13mbps. With Crashplan I was getting around 1mbps, and then 4mbps after disabling dedup and compression. Check it out!

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I did just back up just my logical Drivepool. Let me explain:

 

I have a P: drive for my pool, which in reality is 4 drives. Over time when I used the pool, files were spread randomly in a balanced fashion. Then a disk dies; because the files were spread randomly, random files are now missing from the pool.

 

Crashplan allows me to select exactly what I want to restore. I don't want to select to restore everything as there is no 'do not overwrite existing files' option, and I'm not going to restore multiple terabytes unnecessarily if I only have a few GB of files gone. If I only want to restore the actual missing files I have to work out what is missing and select them individually, this is what took me several days of agony.

 

Anyway, I have just been testing various cloud backup solutions now that Amazon offer unlimited Cloud Drive storage:

  • Cloudberry
  • Arq
  • Cloubacko
  • Duplicati
  • SyncBackPro

Arq and Cloudbacko are similarly restrictive in restore options. Haven't tried the last two yet. But after trying Cloudberry I don't think I'll even bother!

 

Cloudberry looks amazing, great UI, tons of options including the 'do not overwrite existing files' option I was desperately seeking from Crashplan. With this I should be able to just select the entire root and restore the lot and it will just retrieve the missing stuff rather than everything. It's very light on CPU and RAM and the upload is saturating my bandwidth at 13mbps. With Crashplan I was getting around 1mbps, and then 4mbps after disabling dedup and compression. Check it out!

 

Interesting.  I have a very similar setup so now that I understand what you meant I can see how that is will be a pain.

 

I guess logging a feature request with Crashplan would be a good option too so that they can incorporate a "only restore missing" option into their interface.

 

I have about 1.5TB of data on Crashplan so I don't really want to switch.  So far they have been pretty good  but I have not had to do a large restore like that yet.

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I'm assuming that you were not using any duplication as that would negate the need to restore any data after a single drive loss?  Maybe the best way would be to backup each drive then that way you know what to restore if you don't have any duplication?
Like others, I backup my pooled drive but that data is either 2x or 3x duplicated locally.

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To confirm, the easiest method to restore your files in the case of a HDD failure would be to have backed up each drive rather than the logical pool so that the individual drive that failed could be restored?

Don't tink it is good option/ As far as Crashplan doesn't work instantly, and usually is very slow, It is possible to get weird mess of files, i,e, in case you

ordered Drive Pool to rebalance, by changing plugins order or their activity.

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