Keep Folders Together

[wizengamot]

I am using DrivePool to manage a rather large movie collection.  This movie collection contains my rips of Blu-Rays that I own.  I do not rip them as ISO as I prefer to mount the folder directly using my playback software, as opposed to having to mount the ISO then play the drive with the player directly.  Its just easier.  As such I get 45GB folders where there are TONS and TONS of small files.  I just went through a failure of the Pool due to a disaster with a eSATA card but due to the mechanism that you use to store the files, they appear to all be there.  However, some of the blu-rays are on disk1, some on disk 2, some on disk 3 etc to a total of 15 disks (and my pool will just keep getting bigger from there).  

 

I am in the process of re-building the drivepool and I have to take the old disks and copy them one by one back to the new pool and merge the folders together.

 

What I would like is an option that says Keep Folders Together and be able to mark a single folder and being kept together.  That way when I copy say the movie 300 to drivepool I can mark the folder as kept together and even if its duplicated it would be duplicated as a whole on another disk.  I Am not 100% certain this could be done with a balancer algorithm.  I am a programmer so if the way forward is to build a custom balancer, I could write this.  However I thought this might be a good core feature for the software to have itself.  It would make the data for single folders so much more recoverable in the event of a pool failure or a drive failure.

 

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, the optional "Ordered File Placement" balancer definitely does this, actually. However, it changes StableBit DrivePool's default placement strategy. Instead of placing files on the disk with the most free space, it fills up one disk at a time, and tries to keep the contents of each folder on the same drive.

 

It may be worth looking at that, as it may do exactly what you want.

https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Plugins

 

 

Additionally, we do offer the ability to develop 3rd party balancer add-ins.

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_-_Develop_Balancing_Plugins

[wizengamot]

I will take a look at it.  I don't suppose the code for the Ordered File Placement would be available as it would just need a minor tweak to do what I want. The only change I would want to make is to provide a user UI to force all files in folder to a single drive, for folders selected by the user.  Any folder with this flag set, would then slowly have all its files consolidated by the balancer.

 

With the Ordered File Placement plugin I assume the following to be true.  If the disk is ALMOST full say it has 25GB free.  Then I attempt to copy a legal electronic RIP of a Bluray I own and it starts the copy with all the small files and hits the stream folder it will then put the largest stream file on Disk 2 and all the other smaller files on disk 1.  What this means for me is this.  I have to keep DrivePool open and monitor the free space on the current working drive that is being used by DrivePool and if there is not enough room on that drive I need to copy something else until it is full and I know that drive pool has moved on to drive 2 for sure.  Even then if I copy the above mentioned BD folder and there is 10MB free before the disk is marked as full, I assume all the little 1KB files will get put on disk 1 until that 10MB is used up and then the rest of the files go onto Disk 2.  This is the behavior I am attempting to avoid and even with this plugin I don't see this being resolved.  

[Christopher (Drashna)]

You should be able to use the "File Placement Rules" to do that, actually. 

Which does require version 2.X of StableBit DRivePool.

For details on how that works:

http://blog.covecube.com/2014/05/stablebit-drivepool-2-1-0-528-beta-file-placement-update/

 

But depending on how you want things, this may require some micro-management.

 

 

As for the source code, I've flagged Alex (the developer) about that.