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Best Software to Archive TB's of Data


gtaus

Question

I have been running Windows Storage Spaces (SS) for about 4 years without many problems, however, the last 2 months have been nightmare and I have finally lost the SS pool with many of the VirtualDisks on it. IF I can recover the SS data files, I would like to move the data to a long term archive system with some kind of error correction and/or redundancy on USB HDDs. I was hoping that DrivePool would allow me to fill up HDD's and then take the older USB HDD's offline for storage in the closet, or wherever, and take them out only if I needed to access a file that was on a stored drive. It does not look like I can use DrivePool in that manner - all HDD's in the DrivePool must be online. Or do I have that wrong? Currently I have about 24 USB HDD's in my SS pool of drives with 100+ TB of data. In reality, I could easily archive and store about 90 TB of those files, leaving only about 10 TB of recent active data. Does anyone know of solution that I could look into to meet my archive goals?

 

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

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Its a little late in the game but here goes.

 

The biggest task will be allowing your drives to Balance with the Proper File Settings.  For Example Mine.

 

My system is set up according to the Alphabet  Sweet and Simple.

 

Drive Pool 1 is set to T: and Labeled as TV Series - subfolders # thru Z

This allow Sonarr to run and update TV Series.  All active Shows are set to use Season Folders with Format for Shows as Covert Affairs - 01X01-02 - Pilot.

When the Series has ended and all episodes are viewed.  The Show is marked as UNMonitored.  Then it is optimized for TV using the settings in PLEX.

If the file is not on the active viewing, it is Zipped in a fashion that Windows 7 can access it .  It is read only locked  The file will look like Covert Affairs (Complete).

DrivePool can be instructed to Store That Completed file on a particular disk using the plugin 

When you are ready, You can shut the computer down remove the drive, and start it back up

When DrivePool shows its missing.  Remove it.

If the Drivepool has completely Arranged the drive right, you will be able to move the files from under the PoolPart.  The Files will be available most ways possible.  Place a ! in front of the PooPart Entry and it will not join a Pool Partition until your remove the ! from the file.

 

Keep your 10 TB for updates, move them when they are finished.  A Great Bat files checks mine to ensure it is ready and the file is moved to the drive that will keep the copy. 

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First, I'm sorry to hear about the issues with Storage Spaces.  Online tools may be able to help (TestDisk/PhotoRec, Recuva, EaseUS Data Recovery, etc), but not so much if the disk was formatted as ReFS.

 

 

 

As for StableBit DrivePool, yes, the disks do need to be kept online.  It doesn't have an offline/stub option. 

That said, if you take the entire contents of a pool "offline", it will actually disconnect the pool.  At least until one or more disks from that pool are reconnected.   

 

In fact, we have a number of users that use multi bay enclosures and DrivePool to make this simpler.

 

Additionally, you could remove the disks from the system, and remove the now missing disk(s) from the pool.  Once you reconnected them, they'd automatically show back up in the pool.  Which would require removing them again, but .... it could cause issues down the line (balancing/duplication/etc)..

 

 

 

Additionally, with the newer beta version, you can add pools to other pools.  So if you have multiple multi-bay enclosures, you could create pool for each one.  and if needed, create a top level pool with all of these, and ... well, use the above as well.

 

 

 

But bottom line, yes, StableBit DrivePool is designed with the idea that all of the drives are going to be online the entire time that the system is online.   

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