Can I attaching a used pool disk to a particular pool?

[brewsr]

I am upgrading the server disks. I cannot fit old and new disks in my server (27 disks). The old disks will be used in an offsite backup. I would like to keep the data on the old disks. The copying is faster when done in one computer. If I disconnect the old disks they can be removed quickly from the pool. If I build a new empty pool and connect a couple old disks they jump into the active pool. If I use a small empty disk to start a 2nd pool and again try to connect the old disks they go into the main pool. Pool name doesn't matter. There does not seem to be a way to direct a pool disk to the desired pool. 
I am currently doing this by letting old disks use the 1st pool and creating a 2nd pool with empty disks. Then I copy the data. When done I completely remove those diske and do another batch of old and new disks. It will take about 6 days to complete the copy. I will have one odd disk (20tb) that I will need to copy over my Lan.

Selecting which pool the drives should attach to would be a nice feature. Maybe a relocate disk to the desired pool? Maybe eject and attach?

 

[Shane]

Not quite sure what you're saying here, so I'll try to cover a few bases.

Disks from any given pool shouldn't be connecting themselves to a different pool... if moved to a different DrivePool machine they should be reforming their own given pool separate to any other pool that might already be on the different machine.

If you are physically disconnecting the disks then Removing them via the GUI then physically reconnecting the disks to the same machine, the poolparts on those disks will still want to connect to their original pool because DrivePool will see they have a poolpart folder and that folder will still contain the pool metadata that says "this disk is part of (that) pool".

Normally you would only Remove an already-disconnected disk if that disk is dead or gone (i.e. you don't expect to ever reconnect that poolpart to the original machine). So if for some reason you wanted to reconnect the old disk to the old machine and didn't want it to reconnect to its old pool, you should at minimum use a different machine to rename the poolpart folder on the old disk to something else (e.g. from poolpart.string to oldpart.string) before reconnecting it to the old machine.

If you would like to keep copies of the data on the old disks while still removing those disks from the pool, normally you would click Remove and tick the option "Leave pooled filed copies on the removed drive (archival remove)" before confirming the Remove, and only physically disconnecting the disks once the Remove process is complete.

There's a few different "fast but still safe" ways to copy the content of a pool from old disks to new disks; do you plan to have your offsite backup as its own live pool (e.g. to sync it up regularly over the internet) or are you just planning to store the old disks offline, or something else?

[brewsr]

I wanted fewer disks in the server. I see that the 30tb are out and should hit the market soon. I am putting my old disks in a new pool and computer and deleting parts that I don't want to leave this site.

Offsite backup will be in a new pool of its own. I am not doing a total backup offsite as confidential files will still be backed up locally. It also meant that the pools will be of different sizes. I didn't want the existing disks doing any balancing because I might get a stalling prompt during the copy because of duplication. Or possibly missing a file but that would be caught later. I wanted to preserve the existing naming structure so I shut down the system and removed the old pool disks. Restarted and added empty disks to the existing pool. Shut down and connected a couple of the old pool disks. Yep, back into the pool they came from & immediate shutdown. I did not want them doing any balancing. If I had thought a little clearer I should have used a new pool for the new disks and renamed it when I was done. It would have been less complicated if they would all fit in the computer at one time. I have a rosewell b2-spirit case, huge, lots of fans so very cool running.

Was thinking of using Tailscale as the connecting software. I use freefilesync on a scheduled weekly event.

New concern is that I have a disk that has a sizable amount of data showing up as gray other. I have never used duplication as I did a full backup to another computer locally. Is that an file/folder attribute issue? The size is what it should be (no duplicates).

Thank you very much for the help.

[Shane]

4 hours ago, brewsr said:

I am putting my old disks in a new pool and computer and deleting parts that I don't want to leave this site.

Depending on situation, since you're intending to move the old disks offsite I'd advise running a diskfill and/or encryption as deleted files still exist on a disk until their location is overwritten.

4 hours ago, brewsr said:

I didn't want the existing disks doing any balancing because I might get a stalling prompt during the copy because of duplication.

Note that balancing and duplication are separate processes; duplication consistency is checked every 24 hours regardless of balancing. 

4 hours ago, brewsr said:

New concern is that I have a disk that has a sizable amount of data showing up as gray other. I have never used duplication as I did a full backup to another computer locally. Is that an file/folder attribute issue? The size is what it should be (no duplicates).

Could be files lurking in the recycle bin and/or system volume information folders?

4 hours ago, brewsr said:

I wanted fewer disks in the server. I see that the 30tb are out and should hit the market soon.

This would make copying the poolpart disks one or two at a time a tricky prospect as you'll inevitably be juggling disks of different sizes. Setting up the two computers side by side (i.e. on the same LAN) and doing the first backup onsite might be the second slowest method I can think of in terms of just the pool to pool transfer rate* but it'd definitely be the most automated and the safest, if that method is feasible for you. Sometimes slow is fast.

*I'm assuming SATA spinners and gigabit Ethernet so the bottleneck here would be the ethernet. If you've got a pair of 10gig ethernet NICs and a cat 6a cable handy I think it goes from second slowest to second fastest since 10gig Ethernet exceeds 6gig SATA.

[brewsr]

Thanks Shane, great answers.

I'll check those areas for the gray other files. They are active folders that appear in the pool. I copied off a couple gb out of the hidden system folder and deleted them from that area. The gray other size went down. I did a take ownership of them & then copied them back to the pool and the gray other increased. I tried messing with the ownership & flags but no luck.