API available to manage File Placement Rules ?

[Christian Warren]

Hi,

Like others, I really like DrivePool but I would really like a way to consolidate my folders as much as possible:

I understand that DrivePool already juggles with a lot of constraints and rules (duplicated files, balancers, etc) and its complex to add something like this on top of all the rest. 

But, for people that 'only' use DrivePool as a 'meta-disk', I'm thinking that an external application could do this by managing the File Placement Rules.

What I'm thinking is to make an application that would:

• Run once per day or week (there is no need to adjusts often).
• Analyze the content of the files in the pool (recursive folder size, age of files, etc).
• Create/Modify rules according to some principles :
  • Recursively, try to keep whole folder on the same drive.
    Example: 
    • Emulation [100 GB] can fit on the same drive => Add rule "\Emulation\*" => Disk A
    • TV Series [10 TB] cannot fit on the same drive:
      • TV Series\Alias [100 GB] can fit on same drive => "\TV Series\Alias\*" => Disk B
      • TV Series\XYZ [600GB] cannot fit on same drive (or there isn't room left on a disk for the whole folder):
        • TV Series\XYZ\Season 1 [50GB] => "\TV Series\XYZ\Season 1\*" => Disk B
        • TV Series\XYZ\Season 2 [50GB] => "\TV Series\XYZ\Season 2\*" => Disk C
  • To limit the number of drive that are used, I would also try to "fill" the smaller drives with the folder that contain the oldest files (ex. finished series like 'TV Series\Alias').

Is there an API to programmatically manage the File Placement rules?

Thanks,
Christian

[Jaga]

There's plugin development information available for Drivepool on the Development Wiki - creating your own to do what you want seems the more direct route.  Additionally the Drivepool Command Line utility is packaged with the standard distribution, you can call it with dpcmd.exe and run a brief list of commands with it.

I haven't seen any mention of an API, but that doesn't mean one may not exist.  Alex and Christopher are working on new things all the time.  Creation of a custom plugin to do what you want might also benefit others, and integrate seamlessly with Drivepool.

[Christian Warren]

Thanks for the information, Jaga. 

From what I see, a balancer doesn't have this level of control (i.e. choose which files go where) and dpcmd.exe, for now, doesn't have anything for this either.

I also ran "Process Monitor" while adding a rule in the UI to see if DrivePool saved the rules in a file/registry somewhere, that I could modify directly. I saw the rule being added in a json file in "program data" but the content of the file is too 'internal' for an external process to mess around. 

Anyway, for now, I might do an application that would 'tell me' which rules to create manually.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Keep in mind that the Balance plugins don't have a "lot" of variables to work with here, and may not be adequate for your needs.

Additionally, there is no API or interface for interacting with the balancers in such a way.