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Move Poolpart


Edward

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Is it possible to move a specific poolpart folder to a non pooled drive, remove the source drive and include the destination drive into a pool?

One of my drives (very old now) sometimes does not initialise so I would like to retire that drive.  I have a drive inside the system but not in the pool.  

The non pooled drive has plenty of spare space to accommodate the poolpart folder.   Can I simply move the poolpart folder to the non pooled drive and once the move is completed can I simply include the non pooled drive into the pool? Will my pool automagically recognise the moved poolpart folder and incorporate it into the pool as if nothing has happened? 

cheers 

 

 

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I don't think you can do it that way. I guess DrivePool would not recognize the moved PoolPart folder because of its naming scheme. But I'm not sure.

The so called seeding procedure usually works by moving the contents (!) of existing (!) PoolPart folders (with DrivePool service shut down before), but it's also an advanced procedure with potential data loss if things go wrong.

Honestly, why don't you just add the new drive to the pool and then remove the existing one with the GUI? It would migrate the data as you wish and probably not be much less efficient than doing it manually.

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A very simple procedure that works for me.  I've done it loads of times and it always worked fine for me.

1. Define a drive letter to your old drive and new drive.  That is if you don't have one assigned as default...

2. Using file explorer open old drive Poolpart.

3. Highlight all contents and MOVE them to root of drive.  Poolpart on that drive will be empty now.

4. Go into drive pool program and select remeasure pool.  Allow it to finish.  When it does you will see all of the files on the old drive is grayed out.

If not you will have to wait some more on next move.  It has happened to me so be patience.

5. Select remove the old drive from the Pool.  If some files are hung somewhere in the ether, They will come out and be placed back in the Pool on the remaining drives.

8. Copy all of the files from the old drive to the new drive using a program that you trust. You can use file explorer but I don't because the drive/files are damaged 

7. Add the new drive to the existing pool.

8. Now the last part Move all of the contents of the new drive, minus any hidden files to the Poolpart on the new drives.

9. Open Stablebit Pool and remeasure.  Your drive has been swapped out and you have verified all files with your transfer action.

Happy Pooling

Jonibhoni: Yes I agree with you.  Let DrivePool do the heavy moving if you are not sure.  I on the other hand want to get to the files directly.  I use a file scanning program because of many reasons.  Exspecially with some of the 4TB USB Bricks that are sold.  You have to bypass the USB side and bump it to SATA. (Youtube video shows that)

BTW... DrivePool will correct most of the problems when you remeasure.  I could have gone to Storage Spaces  but DrivePool is much better and has more control. 

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11 hours ago, Jonibhoni said:

I don't think you can do it that way. I guess DrivePool would not recognize the moved PoolPart folder because of its naming scheme. But I'm not sure.

The so called seeding procedure usually works by moving the contents (!) of existing (!) PoolPart folders (with DrivePool service shut down before), but it's also an advanced procedure with potential data loss if things go wrong.

Honestly, why don't you just add the new drive to the pool and then remove the existing one with the GUI? It would migrate the data as you wish and probably not be much less efficient than doing it manually.

 

6 hours ago, marquis6461 said:

A very simple procedure that works for me.  I've done it loads of times and it always worked fine for me.

1. Define a drive letter to your old drive and new drive.  That is if you don't have one assigned as default...

2. Using file explorer open old drive Poolpart.

3. Highlight all contents and MOVE them to root of drive.  Poolpart on that drive will be empty now.

4. Go into drive pool program and select remeasure pool.  Allow it to finish.  When it does you will see all of the files on the old drive is grayed out.

If not you will have to wait some more on next move.  It has happened to me so be patience.

5. Select remove the old drive from the Pool.  If some files are hung somewhere in the ether, They will come out and be placed back in the Pool on the remaining drives.

8. Copy all of the files from the old drive to the new drive using a program that you trust. You can use file explorer but I don't because the drive/files are damaged 

7. Add the new drive to the existing pool.

8. Now the last part Move all of the contents of the new drive, minus any hidden files to the Poolpart on the new drives.

9. Open Stablebit Pool and remeasure.  Your drive has been swapped out and you have verified all files with your transfer action.

Happy Pooling

Jonibhoni: Yes I agree with you.  Let DrivePool do the heavy moving if you are not sure.  I on the other hand want to get to the files directly.  I use a file scanning program because of many reasons.  Exspecially with some of the 4TB USB Bricks that are sold.  You have to bypass the USB side and bump it to SATA. (Youtube video shows that)

BTW... DrivePool will correct most of the problems when you remeasure.  I could have gone to Storage Spaces  but DrivePool is much better and has more control. 

Thanks very much to both of you. 

As the failing drive is often not coming up at boot time I already took some pre-cautionary action.  For now I simply COPIED the poolpart folder from the source (soon to fail) drive to the destination drive (which has non drivepool folders on it).  I also did a full verify.  All in all that took a few hours. 

So taking your ideas into account I was wondering if the following will work.

1. Delete all the contents in the poolpart folder on the failing drive.

2. Within the DP GUI 'Remove' that drive.  Let DP do its stuff. 

3. Once DP reports the drive is removed do following steps on the destination (new) drive as follows

4. Outside DP REName the poolpart folder to something different.

5. Add the new drive to DP and let DP create a new Poolpart folder. 

6. MOVE the contents of the folder (as in 4 above) to the newly created Poolpart folder.   If any file version conflict skip the Move (as that file will represent a duplicated file DP may already have done).

7. Force a DP re-measure. 

I think that gets me there (and saves protracted copy commands as Move will simply alter the tables).

Most (over 90%) of the data on the failing drive is duplicated data within the pool anyway.  I'm trying to catch the non-duplicated data (DP has no method of file listing the non-duplicated data or indeed simply being able to copy such non-duplicated data).

thanks very much

 

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I won't judge about your procedure. ;) Seeding usually involves shutting the service down, it may work without, or it may produce errors; I cannot say. I would stick closely to the seeding tutorial on the knowledge base (linked in my first post).

37 minutes ago, Edward said:

I'm trying to catch the non-duplicated data (DP has no method of file listing the non-duplicated data or indeed simply being able to copy such non-duplicated data).

You're probably right in that there is no (easy) method of listing non-duplicated data. Though I remember people on the forum somewhere had something with PowerShell and the official command-line tool that offered something similar like that, locating files and so on...
Anyway, the functionality that you describe here is actually (sorry ^^) in the very official easy clickable GUI solution I pointed out before. If you simply remove a drive in the GUI, DrivePool will offer an option...

Quote
  • Duplicate files later

    • Normally when you remove a drive from the pool the removal process will duplicate protected files before completion. But this can be time consuming so you can instruct it to duplicate your files later in the background.

      Note that when this is enabled, any protected files on the drive being removed will not be fully protected against a drive failure until the background duplication pass completes.

(https://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=Removing a Drive from the Pool)

...which will exactly force the fast moving of unduplicated files from the to-be-removed drive, and then recreating the duplicated files from their existing copies in the pool later after the removal.

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Just to wrap this thread up. Evacuated failing drive and reduped all data. :)

Essentially I followed the recommended DP process of removing a drive, adding a new drive and letting DP do its stuff.  That went smoothly

I figured that as I anyway had a backup of the failing drive poolpart folder to cover me as a plan b as it were I may as well just try the recommended process. I was surprised how fast the evacuation took (only about an hour).  Previously (some years ago) the evacuation of a failing drive never completed (after running for days) which required me to just pull the drive.  This made me cautious leading me to take a copy of poolpart whilst I still had access to the failing drive.  Luckily this time the failing drive stayed up long enough to complete an evacuation. 

One quirk I did find was when I tried to add the drive to the pool that contained the copy of the poolpart folder.  This drive was never used in the pool before, however it errored with "Cannot add the same disk to the pool twice".  Clearly this was nonsense (as the drive was never used in the pool even once) but clearly it was due to the poolpart folder name. I simply renamed the poolpart folder which allowed DP to go through a measure and redup process. I then deleted the backup poolpart folder.

So many thanks to @Jonibhoni and @marquis6461 for their kind help. 

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