426 GB of Other

[FrostyWolf]

As the topic title says, I have large amounts of data I can't account for apparently.  

 

I previously used flexraid (traid) and decided to switch to drivepool + snapraid.  I just bought and set up drivepool today.  I turned of all file duplication and even balancing. I can not, for the life of me, figure out what it's talking about.  I googled, read a bunch of different topics, and tried a couple of things, but can't seem to track it down. 

 

I have windirstat installed and it is not showing anything outside of the poolpart folder on any of the drives reporting large amounts of "Other".  None of the drives have anything I can see outside of poolpart besides Recycle.bin (all empty) and System Volume Information.

 

[Spider99]

it will be the master file table and System volume information etc and will grow as you add more files (slowly) - most if not all is in hidden system files so not immediately visible

 

nothing to worry about its normal - i have about 20GB combined of Other on my pools (115TB)  - but -  i have limited my restore point sizes which reduces the SVI etc a lot

 

if you put your mouse over each drive it will show you how much each drive has of "other"

 

I think there is a wiki or pinned thread on it although i cant find it at the moment

 

Chris will be along later to explain more

 

Ps i would upgrade to the latest beta (lots of fixes you are missing with 2.1.x) - beta's are stable and i have only used them

[FrostyWolf]

I just thought half a TB for 42 TB was a little excessive, but it's normal that's fine. Does anyone know why I have 28.2 GB of "Duplicated" when I don't have duplication turned on?  

 

I'm super learly about running betas on the server...I've been bit many times by beta issues for programs like Plex that have really screwed things up.  

[Spider99]

Yes 426 is large but depends on how you have some of your os features setup

 

that duplicated could be "metadata" that gets duplicated by default - not 100% on that - try a remeasure of the pool it might "fix" some of the other and duplicated

 

nothing to worry about with the beta's they work fine

[Christopher (Drashna)]

You should read this:
http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/37-faq-unduplicated-vs-duplicated-vs-other-vs-unusable/&do=findComment&comment=3635
 

And then there's "Other". "Other" always confuses people, but it literally is everything else.
So what else is there?

• Non-pooled files that exist on that disk. Remember that just because a disk is part of the pool doesn't mean that you can't continue to use that disk to store non-pooled files.
• NTFS Metadata. For every file on a NTFS volume, there is additional metadata associated with that data stream, like the file name, file attributes, modification times, etc. These typically take very little disk space, but can add up if you have lots of files.
• Directory entries. On NTFS, directory entries are actually stored as regular files with a "directory" attribute. But instead of a data stream, they contain a little database of index entries for each file (and subdirectory) that exists under them.
• Slack space. Just because you have a 100GB volume, doesn't mean that you can use all 100 Gigabytes of that volume to store data. NTFS divides your volume into equally sized chunks called clusters, which are typically 4096 bytes in size. If your file doesn't fit neatly into these clusters then there's going to be some space at the end of the file that's wasted. We call this "slack space".
  For example, if you have a 2kb text file, it's going to use the full 4kb cluster, even if 2kb is empty space. Same goes with larger files that don't fill that last cluster, which is very common.

 

And Spider is right, the beta's have a lot of changes to the measurement code, and may actually fix this. 

 

But a good chunk of "other" data may be perfectly normal, depending on the pool and it's content. 

[FrostyWolf]

I switched to the beta, no more duplicated, but other is 451 GB now so it looks like it just went from duplicated to other.  If it's nothing to worry about, I won't worry about it.  

 

Thank you for the help everyone.