Jump to content
  • 0

Upgrading mirrored drives in drivepool


asdaHP

Question

Hi and hope everyone had a good weekend (and thanksgiving in the US).

I have had stablebit drivepool and scanner for the past 3 plus years. It has worked great. I have a mirrored setup of two 4TB drives in my pool. This is housed in a windows server (essentials 2016) that backs my home client PCs nightly and also has server folders for the family. The server is also backed up into an external 8TB drive every day. I am planning on replacing the internal 2 4TB with 2 8TB drives as I am almost out of space. I do not however have an available spot inside the computer to add one or two more drives during the upgrade. So I was wondering what my best (fastest or safest if they differ) options for migration were?

1. Remove one of the two HDDs probably via the DP UI ( i presume i would need to force it to cancel duplication when that happens?) and which of the two should I start first with, given that I believe that one of them tends to have slightly less space maybe from the VSS. Then I pop the first new 8TB drive in its spot, add it via DP, and wait for the over 3TB data to be copied over. Then repeat with the second drive? Or would this be too many writes. A to B and then back to A

2. Switch of the PC, pull one drive out and clone it to the 8TB drive and then do the same for the other. When i put the two new 8TB cloned drives back will DP recognize that these are the same content as the previous pool except for the size? Or does it use serial numbers of the old drives and would that be an issue.

3. Connect one or both of the new 8TB drives to the PC via an external USB enclosure such as the one I have: Unitek 2 drive unitek enclosure  Then ask DP to add them to the same pool and do its magic and move the files to the two new drives? This may take a while given in my experience the external enclosures are slow even if they claim to be USB 3.0.

For options 1 and 2, I presume I should stop all actions in the server like client back up and server backup before I start I presume?

 

Thank you for your time.

Best

AK

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

  • 0

i would go with option 1 - as you only have two drives with duplication so they are the "same" - does not matter which one you choose - vss will not be copied etc

3 - would work but will be slower than 1

2 - avoid cloning liable to give you problems

and yes - shut down any service thats writing to the pool before you start - more for maintaining the best speed

internal copy will be approx 1TB per 3 hrs - give or take - remember speed will vary by files size (lots of small files very slow) (large files quick) and where the data is on the disk - i suspect that the new 8TB will be quicker than the 4TB so the speed will depend on the 4TB disk....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0
8 hours ago, Spider99 said:

i would go with option 1 - as you only have two drives with duplication so they are the "same" - does not matter which one you choose - vss will not be copied etc

3 - would work but will be slower than 1

2 - avoid cloning liable to give you problems

and yes - shut down any service thats writing to the pool before you start - more for maintaining the best speed

internal copy will be approx 1TB per 3 hrs - give or take - remember speed will vary by files size (lots of small files very slow) (large files quick) and where the data is on the disk - i suspect that the new 8TB will be quicker than the 4TB so the speed will depend on the 4TB disk....

Thanks @Spider99. I am glad you are still here on this board. Hope you are well. Its been a while since I posted.

Ok, will plan on option 1. Now just to get some Red plus 8TB drives. 

If I remember correctly, you used to run a WS 2012r2 with DP and scanner. I probably should post this question in the scanner section, but since you probably have a similar setup, meant to ask you. Does scanner not pick up corrupt sectors, files from a failing drive copy? This weekend coincidentally one of my home PCs had a data drive start clicking. Before i got to clone and replace it, it was all gone. I thought no big deal, I have a nightly backup. Well apparently the bare metal restore is a little more complicated on WS 16 essentials than was on my old EX490 WHS and needs a bunch of steps (windows PE etc). So i went with recovering selective folders by using the restore function. Here i ran into issues with some folders and files in the backup apparently corrupt (per the restore software). I was able to pull a much older version from august and those were not corrupted. Luckily the recently modified folders in the more recent version of backup were not corrupted. The only ones i couldnt get out were ones that claimed I didnt have permission (probably encrypted).

But I wondered if a client PC drive was developing corruptions, and these files were nightly being backed up into the server in hard drives where the Stablebit scanner was constantly running, why didnt scanner notify me? Or does scanner only find stuff when it runs its full scan? To this minute scanner isnt reporting any corruptions on either of the duplicate server hard drives.

Have a great day.

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

2012r2 and scanner work fine - picks up bad sectors - when the scan is run/or when smart reports it

but its not going to find dead drive sectors in real time - if thats what you want - don't think anything does that - as it would kill the drives in weeks/months as you would have to read each sector - again and again

maybe you need better backup software that does a hash check / compares the files before it overwrites?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0
On 12/1/2020 at 7:56 AM, Spider99 said:

2012r2 and scanner work fine - picks up bad sectors - when the scan is run/or when smart reports it

but its not going to find dead drive sectors in real time - if thats what you want - don't think anything does that - as it would kill the drives in weeks/months as you would have to read each sector - again and again

maybe you need better backup software that does a hash check / compares the files before it overwrites?

Thanks. Sorry didnt seen your reply in my email box yday. Just found it now.

I see what you mean. By the way I wasnt referring to corrupt sectors on the drives in drivepool itself. Drivepool is in my server which backs the client PCs and one of these PCs presumably had corruptions develop from bad sectors. The bad file was probably being copied into the server drives. I didnt know there were corrupt files till I tired restoring the drive and windows stated they couldnt be copied to the new drive because of corruption. I am glad I had multiple versions of backups and the older ones were fine.

By the way, are there backup softwares that you like more. I tried veeam before but it wouldnt work with Drivepool's duplication setup.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0

i use veeam to backup the server os drive and any non pool drives

i use SyncBackPro to backup my pool - has millions of options - but i backup pool a to pool b - simple mirror (overwrites, deletes or copies new files etc) - basic a set and forget option

I also get it to do a backup to my QNAP nas once a week - across my network (10g) and it runs as fast as the dp disks can provide the data

if it has an issue when running - it will pop up a html report on the server - something you cant miss - for me its usually i have removed/renamed something while it was running

possibly the free version of syncback maybe enough - but i bought it a while ago and it works very well with DP

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 0
18 hours ago, Spider99 said:

i use veeam to backup the server os drive and any non pool drives

i use SyncBackPro to backup my pool - has millions of options - but i backup pool a to pool b - simple mirror (overwrites, deletes or copies new files etc) - basic a set and forget option

I also get it to do a backup to my QNAP nas once a week - across my network (10g) and it runs as fast as the dp disks can provide the data

if it has an issue when running - it will pop up a html report on the server - something you cant miss - for me its usually i have removed/renamed something while it was running

possibly the free version of syncback maybe enough - but i bought it a while ago and it works very well with DP

Thank you!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Answer this question...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...