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Micro-management Of Drivepool - Solved by using junctions.


Dave Hobson

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Hey Christopher.

I tend to Micro-manage my media in Drivepool and I have a lot of media.

I seem to be having issues here with the various placement rules I have Set. After balancing i get the message at the bottom saying along the lines of "x amount of media cannot be moved to respect file placement rules". What I'm wondering is if there is anywhere in the logs or similar, that gives more info on the files that cannot be moved according to the rules I have set? 

Clearly I have something wrong somewhere despite no drive having less than 500GB of space free and the offending files amount to only around 234GB. No worries if there isn't I will trawl though and see if I can find the offending files/rules that way.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

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All of the service logs are in "C:\ProgramData\StableBit DrivePool\", but I don't think that this is well logged, unfortunately.

However, the UI may show some of this, at least.  It should show where files are located in the bottom left section.  As seen here:
http://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=File Placement

 

That said, the feedback here needs improvement, and it is on our todo list.

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1 hour ago, Christopher (Drashna) said:

All of the service logs are in "C:\ProgramData\StableBit DrivePool\", but I don't think that this is well logged, unfortunately.

However, the UI may show some of this, at least.  It should show where files are located in the bottom left section.  As seen here:
http://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=File Placement

 

That said, the feedback here needs improvement, and it is on our todo list.

Thanks Christopher.

Yeah the logs don't give details but I came up with a strategy. 

As  I mentioned I micromanage almost all my media. I'm heavily into remux quality at the moment for Shows & Movies and replacing a lot of my encode movies with remux.

The only thing that isn't micromanaged are the movie encodes that I'm starting to replace. They can sit on ANY of 5 drives each has a decent amount of space free and one is actually empty.  Anyway I have the "never allow files to be placed on any other disks" enabled on all my folders and thought if i take the option out of the equation a folder at a time in theory whatever it didn't want to move should start to move. I started with the movie encode folder despite knowing that there are pretty much no limitations on that particular folder (with 5 drives to chose from.) 

Waddya know. Drivepool immediately started balancing. I will let it run it's course and see where it decides to move the files. Hopefully it will stay within the 5 disks assigned.

Thanks for the reply. 

 

Dave

 

 

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On 05/04/2018 at 3:22 AM, Christopher (Drashna) said:

Ah, so it may not have had enough space on one or more of the disks, then.That can happen. Also, if you disabled the "Prevent Drive Overfill" balancer, it may have fixed this, as well. 

Actually I spoke too soon. The  balancing finished and it shuffled some files across the 5 disks. The result was it went from saying 256GB Couldn't be moved to almost 3TB. It then immediately balanced again and within 2 minutes went back to 256GB again. 

I now have every single folder on every drive allowing to use other drives if required. Still 256GB cannot be moved. As for the balancers I'm only using SSD optimizer (No duplication whatsoever.) No other balancers are active.

I also reset permissions in case something was locked. 

At a total loss now, but not the end of the world.

 

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EDIT.

Nailed it. It seems that over the years the years. The rules tab circled in this screenshot (and which I have never really ventured into) had got pretty cluttered and there were probably some rules contradicting from days gone by. I just totally emptied one of my 8TB drives and cleared all the rules and am starting from scratch. Interestingly i just purchased an 8 bay DAS to replace a second server that Plex also points to. Since i moved the drives to it, sections of the Drivepool UI became very slow to respond and was on the point of returning the DAS and putting the drives back in the 2nd server. However since clearing all the rules the issue is gone and everything is snappy. I think I was stressing Drivepool out.  :-)

I guess its not normal to fine tune to the extent I do but as I'm really into very high bitrate  4K & 1080p remux I tend to go overboard at knowing my files aren't heavily fragmented because I use Sonarr and do upgrade quality to remux when available, so generally what starts as a non fragmented drive  can be become fragmented quickly. Hence the micromanagement and trying to fill drives via rules when optimal quality is reached. 

All good now thanks. 

Capture100.PNG.f0e60feb5c64868ef9b56404da752683.PNG

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OK. I'm still struggling to get my required results.

However despite using DrivePool for many years I'm just reading about pooling Multiple DrivePools (something I didn't know existed.) My bad!!

Now I'm wondering if that's gonna fit my needs. Sadly though most of the examples and the threads I have read seem to be about using it with a "home" pool & a "cloud" pool.

What will this give me using several home pools? I create them and then add each pool to a master pool. Meanwhile each sub pool can have its own rules etc... and for TV shows that I have reached optimal quality I can set  all the drives to fill by cascade or whatever?

What will i actually see in the master pool after I do this? As an example let's say I have the show "The Blacklist". I have seasons 1-4 in remux quality and one of the pools consists only of such quality. Another sub pool has active seasons, in this case season 5 which is current and will be eventually upgraded. 

Will the master pool see all five seasons with a single path that Sonarr can be pointed to? I'm just really not sure what to expect here. If it does, problem solved. If not well I can limit my archive placement to a Show level rather than the season level that I'm hoping to achieve. Confused? Yeah me too. :P

 

Many many apologies... and I feel I'm taking up way too much or your time. I'm more than happy with a yes or no..this will/will not work. :)

Never mind. Issue totally solved with junctions to my media which Sonarr is happily able to see. :)

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12 minutes ago, Christopher (Drashna) said:

Working now?

Mmm... Yeah

Many apologies because at the time I marked the issue solved I posted but clearly didn't hit save because it isn't here now.:rolleyes:

Hence the reason I edited out the other posts to save you the trouble of reading through my now irrelevant rambling.

But yeah the whole micromanagement thing became a breeze after I read about Directory Junctions somewhere here in these forums.

My archived seasons sit on a separate pool to my current seasons and I have DJ's for the archived seasons pointing back to where the current seasons are.

Sonarr & Plex are able to see all the seasons simply by pointing to the active/current seasons directory. I really can't believe I only just discovered Directory Junctions though.

 

 

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On 18/04/2018 at 12:03 AM, Christopher (Drashna) said:

Agree.  I use Link Shell Extension, as well.  It is super useful! 

 

Even more useful now.

I have all my data more or less duplicated on gdrive. As my penchant for higher quality files grows local space becomes more of an issue (but not in anyway terminal).

As a result some shows that friends/family have asked for and not to my personal taste reside solely on gdrive (which has a separate Plex Server attached to it). I tried NetDrive @ Drive File Stream for a while, pointing my local server to those. This lead to one of two evils. All the shows I have locally would show as duplicates OR in Plex I would have to point to the individual show directories for stuff that is only on google (far too lazy to separate the shows on google itself).

On a whim I just decided to see what would happen if i selected some show folders on Drive File Stream and make directories junctions for them. I really didn't expect it to work and yet it did. I went to my google api screen to monitor the hits while Plex scanned the files in and everything was fine. 

So now I'm gonna set up a separate folder consisting only of these junction points and point Plex to that. If I do ever get around to watching these shows they are there without switching to the Gdrive mounted server or having to download terrabytes of data locally for shows I may never bother with. 

 

I have no idea about Directory Junctions inner workings... but wow this is game changing for me. :)

 

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