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Folder Duplication and Failed Drive Scenario


HTWingNut

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I recently started using DrivePool. I love the concept, no worries about RAID configuration, and like the idea of having the data easily accessible if I just pull a drive. Granted data is scattered across multiple drives, but it's still regular data I can access from any Windows machine without need of special software or controller.

In any case, I am making use of folder duplication for my most critical files, but also have all the data on my server (duplicated and non duplicated) backed up to a single external drive on a regular basis.

That being said, I was thinking of the scenario where a drive goes bad. While the duplicated folder data can be recreated (assuming) if I throw in a replacement drive, how do I know what files were on the bad drive to restore from my backup drive? Is this a feature in DrivePool? Or would I need to resort to a third party app to do a file compare and restore?

Thanks.

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Your asking about the unduplicated data that is lost getting restored from your backup?

I think you’d have to rely on a 3rd party tool to compare your backup to the pooled drive. Something like FreeFileSync would do the trick nicely I think. 

I'm reletively new here, but I haven't read about any kind of report that would list the files lost in this scenario. Maybe others will jump in and correct me.

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Thanks for the response. 

Yes, pretty much. As in DrivePool saying "hey, this drive is bad, here's the files that were on it". Because the files are spread across all drives in the pool, I won't know which files are affected.

Now that I've been using DrivePool for a little while now, I don't believe such a report tool exists. That would be a nice feature to have. I'm sure I could use a third party tool to compare against the backup, but DrivePool must know what data is where since it manages it, how about a log tool to show me what file are where?

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No, DP does not know which files are on a lost/disconnected/removed drive. For that it would have to maintain some sort of database which, to my mind, goes against the idea of a lean and "simple' app. Having said that, there is the DPCMD command line app that does create a list of all files in the Pool. However, that is a snapshot only.

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How does this go against "lean and simple'? By nature of a file system it needs to know folder structure and what files exist, what's the big deal having an extra data point saying "drive 1"? How does it balance data if it doesn't know what files are on which drives?

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Well, it does indeed need such a list. But rather then keeping its own list, it uses the standard NTFS database on the underlying drives. Now I am not the developer but my guess is that whenever DP balances, it DP simply queries the underlying Drives for the data on the files.

Edit: Also, keeping a seperate database up-to-date may actually be quite burdensom as a user may alter files in the Pool without going through DP by operating on the underlying drives.

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8 hours ago, Umfriend said:

Well, it does indeed need such a list. But rather then keeping its own list, it uses the standard NTFS database on the underlying drives. Now I am not the developer but my guess is that whenever DP balances, it DP simply queries the underlying Drives for the data on the files.

Edit: Also, keeping a seperate database up-to-date may actually be quite burdensom as a user may alter files in the Pool without going through DP by operating on the underlying drives.

This is correct.  It's part of why the start of balancing (or duplication) can take a while. It is checking the state of the pool, and building lists (bucket lists) for what to move. 

 

And yeah, a separate database would be something like sqlite, and be stored on the disk. This would be very large, and very expensive to maintain.   It's been requested in the past, but the impact of doing so is not insignificant.  

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