Multiple pools on same physical drives?

[jamesquintin]

Hi,

Had a quick search on the forums but couldn't find what I'm looking for...

I had a WHS 2011 running for a few years, all fine, then lost a 3tb drive. I decided to take the plunge and get Drivepool on there for redundancy (backup is being done to Crashplan)

At the same time my external USB drive was backing up the shares but that was full, and I never got around to sorting it out before I installed drivepool.

I've now got 2 x 3tb drives & 2 x 2tb drives in my server all pooled together with duplication, and everything is great with a 9tb Drivepool drive, until...

WHS can't backup any of the shares now because they are all on a drive bigger than the 2tb whs limit!

What I would like to do now is essentially partition the current Drivepool into a 7.2tb & 1.8tb drive so I can put all my photos/home videos/music on the 1.8tb pool for WHS to make backups with (I want incremental in case of file corruption) and just leave the 7tb drive with redundancy as that just has my media center recorded TV on it
 

Can I run 2 pools on the same 4 drives?

 

Hopefully that makes sense?

 

JQ

 

 

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Each "volume" can only belong to one Pool. 

 

That said, normally, you'd only have one partition on the disk, so only one volume.  But you can have multiple partitions on a drive, and you'd end up with multiple volumes on that disk.

(volumes can span disks, but that requires dynamic disks which we don't support ATM). 

 

So partitioning the drives up like that, you can definitely add the multiple partitions to the same pool, even if they're on the same disk. And DrivePool is aware when volumes are on the same disk and does not use those volumes for duplication of anything on the other volume/partition on the same disk.

 

So you don't need to set up two pools. You can keep just the one.

[jamesquintin]

Hi,

I'm not sure I made myself clear... The current pool is 9tb, which is bigger than the WHS built in backup limit of 2tb, hence the need for a smaller pool for backing up the important stuff, and another pool for the stuff that just need hardware redundancy

Q
 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

That I did understand. And sorry if I skipped over some facts here.

 

Specifically, even if the Pool was under 2TBs, we don't support Volume Shadow Copies. Which means you cannot use Server Backup to backup the pool, as that feature is built on and completely dependant on the Volume Shadowcopy Service (VSS).  You'd need to backup the individual pool parts. That is the only supported method to backup the pool. Sorry.

 

You can use other file based solutions (such as Allways Sync, or Microsoft's SyncToy), to copy the files to a different drive/pool.