Migrating data on existing drive added to pool

[Xero]

I have created a pool and added 3 drives, all which have existing data on them.  The end goal is to migrate all of the data to the pool.  I have moved some data in 2 different ways so far.  

 

First I open up my pooled drive (X:) and 1 of the other drives (E:), and simple copy from E: to X:.  This copies the data, which I do not want, as I simple want to move it.  Also, it is slow as it copies the data.  

 

Second I opened my E: drive and manually moved files directly into the hidden 'poolpart' folder.  This instantly moves it to the pool without copying.

 

I am wondering, if there a negative impact of doing this?  I understand I would likely need to do a remeasure after doing this, but are there any potential issues I should be aware of?

 

Also, if this is a standard practice, I apologize for the question!

[Umfriend]

Personally, if the space was sufficient, I would always do a copy and delete.

 

However, I have seen enough posts from people who know about this to know that copying into the poolpart folders can be done without any problem as well, in fact, Drashna often suggests it.

 

Will you duplicate files?

 

Bear in mind that if you use the poolpart-route then the way files are placed will not be equal over all disks but as you copied them to the respective drives until DP does something, not sure what. I don't really know about these things because, well, it simply always seems to work for me.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Xero,

 

It's not well documented, nor explicitly mentioned in documentation. But yes, this is standard practice, and we recommend it for "seeding" a new pool (aka switching to it).

The reason we don't document it really, is because you need to understand the caveats.

 

It's quick, and simple.

But you absolutely do need to remeasure the pool.

You also need to make sure that the NTFS permissions are "in order". (at the very least, that SYSTEM has full control on everything). 

And ideally, you will also want to make sure that the StableBit DrivePool service is stopped while doing this, so it doesn't try to duplicate or balance the data.

Once it's done, you can start the service and remeasure.

[Xero]

Great, thanks for the information!  I migrated everything over and all is functioning correctly.

 

One thing I noticed however is one of the drives has 37.9 GB of "other".  What is this and how do I determine what it is?  When I browse directly to the drive the ONLY item is the hidden poolpart folder.  I have remeasured several times, but can not figure out what is taking up that space?  Properties of the actual physical drive, in this case E: shows used space 116GB, properties of the poolpart folder shows 76GB.

 

I am in the process of moving all the data off of this drive in hopes of reformatting it to correct the issue, but I wanted to see if this is something others have experienced?

 

 

 

[Edit: I came across another post of a user having the same issue where a reformat corrected the problem.  Hopefully it will do the same for me!]

 

Update: reformatting appears to have corrected the issue.  I noticed after I had completed removed the drive from the pool, windows still thought it had 37 GB on it. Like before, nothing was hidden, there was no data to be found. Puzzles me.  Also, I had system restore turned off, and no shadow copies.  I had tried to remove and 'clean' the drive but nothing changed.

[Umfriend]

Could you see _all_ files, including hidden system files? Often, there a SystemVolumeInformation that you can not get into and where Explorer will tell you that it is empty (or at least occupies 0 bytes). Explorer is lying in such case.

[Xero]

I had everything set to show hidden folders and files, however I did not think about the systemvolumeinformation folder that was likely there.I supposed I could have booted the system with a live cd to look closer to see what was 'there' 

[Umfriend]

You can also get rights to it, but it is a hasle. I just do it because I begrudge my OS access to a resource that I cannot access myself. something with Properties -> Security -> Advanced -> Owner -> Edit -> Change owner to user. Had to give OWNER RIGHTS as well first and then I coudl give OWNER RIGHTS full access and got in. Something like that at least.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

you will almost always see some "other" data. 

 

I mean no offense, but the post is tagged as "FAQ" for a reason:

http://community.covecube.com/index.php?/topic/37-faq-unduplicated-vs-duplicated-vs-other-vs-unusable/

 

That reason, being that it may not be clear as to why it's "other". But the above link clarifies that.

[roller]

I was just about to ask a similar question as I am about to start using (or at least trying but have a full license already) Drivepool to gather up all my SnapRAIDed drives. I am happy with the solutions moving data into the hidden drivepool folder.

 

My caveat is I have some duplicate folders and files on different drives that will make up part of the pool. How will drivepool cope with this?

 

Just for further info - these aren't so much copies for redundancy but copies made of failing data on an extrenal drive through different methods and I have to wade through all these files at some point to verify which copies are most in tact.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

It depends on the files. If they're in the same location on both disks, it will try to verify that they are indeed duplicate files. However, if they're in different locations.... then DrivePool .... ignores them when it comes to duplication. Specifically, duplciates are kept in identical folder structures on each disk. So they have to be matching as well to be considered as duplicates.

[roller]

That helps. Thanks.