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2nd request for help


aBe_FX35

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Hello everyone,

I currently have 4 drives in my drivepool, i am going to transition to a synology DS1019+ without using stablebit software. As drivepool does it has my data scattered between the drives, i need to MOVE all my data to 1 drive, so i can use the other 3 drives in another system and have them formatted without losing my data. How do i move my data all to one drive and empty the rest. Do i uninstall drivepool ? When i click on the hidden folders in each drive, they seem to have the same folder setup on each drive, even though my data duplication is disabled. I basically wanna go back to basics and have windows see these 4 drives as non pooled drives, and send ALL my data from the pool to 1 drive, and empty the rest.

(this is my plex media server drivepool, im assuming once i do this plex will not work until i set it up on my other machine)

 

Thank you

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I have only been using DrivePool for a short period, but if I understand your situation, you should be able to open the DrivePool UI and click on the "Remove" drive for the drives you no longer want in the pool. I have done this in DrivePool and it did a good job in transferring the files from the "remove" drive to the other pool drives. However, given nowadays we have large HDDs in our pools, the process takes a long time. Patience is a virtue.

Another option is to simply view the hidden files on those HDDs you no long want to keep in DrivePool, and then copy them all over to the one drive you want to consolidate all your information. Once you verify all your files have been successfully reassembled on that one drive, you could go back and format those other drives. The main advantage I see with using DrivePool is that the files are written to the HDD as standard NTFS files, and if you decided to leave the DrivePool environment, all those files are still accessible by simply viewing the hidden directory.

I am coming from the Windows Storage Space system where bits and pieces of files are written to the HDDs in the pool. When things go bad with Storage Spaces, there is no way to reassemble the broken files spread across a number of HDDs. At least with DrivePool, the entire file is written to a HDD as a standard file, so in theory you should be able to copy those files from the pool HDDs over to one HDD and have a complete directory. I used the Duplication feature of DrivePool for important directories.

Again, I am still learning the benefits of DrivePool over Storage Spaces, but so far, I think DrivePool has the advantage of recovering data from a catastrophic failure whereas I lost all my data in Storage Spaces. If there is a better to transfer your DrivePool files to 1 HDD, I would like to know for my benefit as well.

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2 hours ago, gtaus said:

I have only been using DrivePool for a short period, but if I understand your situation, you should be able to open the DrivePool UI and click on the "Remove" drive for the drives you no longer want in the pool. I have done this in DrivePool and it did a good job in transferring the files from the "remove" drive to the other pool drives. However, given nowadays we have large HDDs in our pools, the process takes a long time. Patience is a virtue.

Another option is to simply view the hidden files on those HDDs you no long want to keep in DrivePool, and then copy them all over to the one drive you want to consolidate all your information. Once you verify all your files have been successfully reassembled on that one drive, you could go back and format those other drives. The main advantage I see with using DrivePool is that the files are written to the HDD as standard NTFS files, and if you decided to leave the DrivePool environment, all those files are still accessible by simply viewing the hidden directory.

I am coming from the Windows Storage Space system where bits and pieces of files are written to the HDDs in the pool. When things go bad with Storage Spaces, there is no way to reassemble the broken files spread across a number of HDDs. At least with DrivePool, the entire file is written to a HDD as a standard file, so in theory you should be able to copy those files from the pool HDDs over to one HDD and have a complete directory. I used the Duplication feature of DrivePool for important directories.

Again, I am still learning the benefits of DrivePool over Storage Spaces, but so far, I think DrivePool has the advantage of recovering data from a catastrophic failure whereas I lost all my data in Storage Spaces. If there is a better to transfer your DrivePool files to 1 HDD, I would like to know for my benefit as well.

Thank you for your response, I do like stablebit drive pool been using it for years, however i am moving on to a new type of setup. So you told me to "remove" drives from the pool then it will automatically balance out. for example .... i have 4 drives in the pool right now .... x2 4TB and x2 8 TB...... i need all my data emptied from all these drives and placed on 1 8 TB drive as backup. The rest of the drives will be pulled and formatted for a new system. So would i remove all drives from the pool leaving that 1 8 TB drive and all data will be forced to it ? does sound like a long process.

2nd option, which seems more straight forward and faster is "show hidden files" and the CUT the files i want/need from each drive and paste them to my 8tb backup drive. That is the normal way when wanted to move files from one drive to another which makes total sense, however, when i look at hidden files on each drive, it looks like duplicates of the same thing, so how do i know or keep track of what im cutting/pasting to that 1 drive i want ? the thing is everything is "balanced" between my 4 drives, so bits and pieces are here and there which makes not missing any vital data/media kinda tedious. 

 

In short, want to select the main folders in my pool CUT and PASTE them to my 8TB drive in the pool, keep as back up and delete the rest of the data off the remaining 3 drives.i tried to upload a photo to show you what i mean, but these forums are horrible and it never works. MAX TOTAL FILE SIZE 0.01 MB ? REALLY ? LOL

 

EDIT: So i have 2 pictures, 1 showing the folders I WANT to transfer to my 8 TB drive that is in the pool, and the rest of the data i will be deleting.

2nd picture is showing 2 different drives within my pool, SAME tv show, showing that the episodes are split up (as they should be) so each drive within the pool has a little bit of data from each show/movie. This will take forever to go to each individual drive and CUT/PASTE every little bit from each drive so i can collect all my media and send it to 1 individual drive, how do i cut/paste what files i want without having to do mission impossible to collect them all. Usually when u have no drive pool, u just go to 1 driver, CUT this whole folder and past to where you want everything to go and ur done. how do i do that in this case ? do i disable drivepool/uninstall ? will everything still be sprinkled around 4 drives ? im not gonna be using the software anymore on this machine so i need the simplist and safest solution.

https://imgur.com/a/JK1lvGz

 

Thank you all

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Use remove. You can move through Explorer but if you do that you need to stop the drivepool service first. Moreover, once you start DP service, it may try to rebalance files back to other drives so you need to turn of balancing to prevent that from happening. Also, if you have duplication then you want to disable that first. Yes, it will all take some time but it has, AFAIK, never failed. Quick and dirty though... not that failsafe sometimes. And even cutting/pasting will take quite some time.

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Note: Just in case it needs to be mentioned, a drive is only a "backup" if the files on it are also somewhere else. If at any point you don't have a copy somewhere else, you don't have a backup.

So as gtaus and Umfriend have said, the simplest way would be to use DrivePool's Remove feature.

To speed that process up, since you intend to stop using DrivePool and want everything in your pool moved to a single drive, you could do the following:

  1. If there are any files/folders in the pool that you do NOT want to keep at all, consider deleting them first. There's no point having DrivePool waste time moving them to the last drive.
     
  2. Open up the Manage Pool -> Balancing menu.
     
    1. Settings tab, ensure "Balance immediately", "Allow balancing plug-ins to force immediate balancing" and (if present) "File placement rules respect real-time file placement limits set by the balancing plug-ins" are all ticked. Ensure that "Not more often than every:" and (if present) "Balancing plug-ins respect file placement rules" are NOT ticked.
       
    2. Balancers tab, untick all balancers except Drive Usage Limiter (and StableBit Scanner if present). In the Drive Usage Limiter balancer, untick all drives except the one you plan to keep.
       
    3. Click "Save". DrivePool should start moving all files on the pool to that drive. You can also manually force it, tell it to increase the priority of the balancing, or just go directly to the next step.
       
  3. Proceed to use the "Remove" feature to remove the other drives.
     
  4. Set up your Synology Diskstation with the removed drives (or whatever drives you're planning to use).
     
  5. Copy your files across from (the last drive in) the pool to your new Diskstation array.

The above should stop DrivePool from continuing to balance your files across the remaining drives as you remove each one, instead placing them all directly on your chosen drive, while still allowing DrivePool to warn you if there are any problems with doing that.

P.S. If you must for some reason bypass Drivepool, yes, you could cut and paste as you suggested, but read Umfriend's warning about that.

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