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Limit duplicate file placement to specific drives


phhowe17

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Just getting started with Folder duplication and can't find a way to limit file placement to selected drives.  Is this a possibility?

 

Also - Feature request - allow checking multiple folders and adding folders to duplication.  e.g. I have 20 folders and want 11 duplicated but not the remaining folder.

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There is the Drive Usage Limiter Balancer that allows you to set individual drives to store only duplicated or unduplicated files. So you could set drive 2 to only hold unduplicated files. It would mean that if you have duplicated files, none of the duplicates would arrive there.

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Thanks Umfriend. That would mean though that duplicate files can only go on disk 1 and 3. The idea is to have everything in disks 1 and 2 to be duplicated in disk 3. 

To make it more complicated, say you have 5 disks and you want to set disks 4 and 5 to be the duplicate drives of disks 1, 2 and 3. 

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There are file placement rules that may help but I never used them.

I do use hierarchical pooling to ensure one duplicate is on one and the other on another group of disks so that I only need to backup one set of disks. Maybe that can help you.

But afaik, within one pool, there is no way to ensure one and only one duplicate ends up at a specific subset of HDD and the other duplicate on another subset.

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Thanks. I looked into the placement rules too but it doesn't really lend to using the whole available space of the pooled drives. At most I can assign a folder to drives 1 and 4 and do a full duplication and assign a different folder for to drives 2 and 5 and do a full duplication.  As soon as you assign a folder to more than 2 drives e.g. 1, 2 and 5, then there's a possibility that the duplicate of files in drive 1 goes to drive 2 instead of drive 5. Might as well as do a raid 1 on each of the paired drive.

 

Hierarchical pooling is the only solution I can think of too. Pool A with drives 1, 2 and 3 and Pool B with drives 4 and 5. then Pool A and B together into Pool X and set Pool B for duplicated files only. This will keep duplicated and unduplicated files in Pool A (drives 1, 2 and 3) and duplicate only files in Pool B (drives 4 and 5). Seems to be a good workaround but makes your pool more complicated, specially when you have multiple pool groups that now need to be added to another level of pools.

 

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On 1/11/2022 at 2:42 AM, Umfriend said:

Yes, it does get more complicated, especially if you want only parts duplicated. Perhaps to simplify you could (a) duplicate all, (b) duplicate nothing and have real backups or (c) have separate Pools for duplicated files and unduplicated files?

Yes,

a) I am currently duplicating all files, from Pool A to Pool B. But I still need the Hierarchical pooling to do so because Pool A has drives 1, 2 and 3 and Pool B has drives 4 and 5 which are the designated duplication drives. I cannot do that with just one flat pool with drives 1-5 because I cannot force drives 4 and 5 to be the only drives where duplicates can reside. (e.g. I don't want files in drive 1 to have its duplicate in drive 2 or 3). In reality, Pool A has local HDDs 1, 2 and 3 and Pool B has cloud drives 4 and 5 so I want to make sure that the files in the local HDDs are being duplicated to the cloud drives, not to another local HDD.

b) I am backing up Pool X (full duplication of Pools A and B ) to "Backup A"

c)  I can but that adds more pools. In the above Hierarchical pooling, I can have unduplicated files in Pool A (in drives 1, 2, and 3), that doesn't get duplicated to Pool B (drives 4 and 5). I can keep growing Pool A to host all unduplicated files while growing Pool B with just enough storage for all duplicated files.

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I see. Yes, it takes a but of engineering but I think it is the best way to go.

Edit: I would consider to do:

Pool A: HDD 1, 2, 3, x1 duplication
Pool B: CloudDrive 4+5, x1 duplication
Pool C: Pool A + Pool B, x2 duplication

And then, for files that you do not want duplicated, do not store them in Pool C but in Pool A. So for a "user" it would seem his files are on two (virtual) drives, Pool A for undup and Pool C for duplicated files. I am guessing here that the distinction between Pool A and Pool C is clear cut (e.g., work files in Pool C, downloaded media in Pool A). Otherwise this won't work well for a user.

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