Migrating from drivebender

JDThird

Been getting more and more frustrated with Drivebender, and having read the forums here some tonight, seeing that people look to have better luck with drivepool.  So I have seven 3TB drives, about 17TB of multimedia data on them.  I see parts of the website that say just add a drive to the pool and maintain the information.  If that's the case, I assume I'd be able to unplug my seven pool drives, uninstall drivebender, install drive pool, and then just re-add the seven 3TB drives one at a time to a new pool and retain the info?  I have no duplication going at the moment (egads, how insane would we have sounded 10 years ago saying we don't have enough room for duplication with 21 terabytes of disk space?). 

Is it really that straight forward?  Anyone migrate from drivebender already, and what was your experience and method?

Thanks for any information.

John

datageek

I haven't tried DriveBender, but I'm fairly certain you'll need to do a few more steps.

1. Via WHS Dashboard, create the appropriate share folders in DrivePool or move existing empty folders into the pool to match the structure you want. Don't turn on duplication yet.
   
2. Via Windows Explorer (and preferably using Teracopy or similar), move the data from the DriveBender {GUID} folders into the DrivePool folders.

For step 2, ideally this would be done via the pool drive (i.e. via the new drive letter that maps to the pool), however with very large amounts of data it might take a long time and could throw an error that there isn't enough free space if you try to do this all at once.

The unsupported shortcut is to go into the individual drives (you might need to assign drive letters or mount points using Drive Management - see http://support.drivebender.com/entries/20437652-understanding-a-pooled-drive-s-structure), find the relevant PoolPart.* folder and the relevant subfolders matching the share folder names, and move the contents of the relevant {GUID} folders into the PoolPart.*\* folders (open the { *GUID* }. MP.$DRIVEBENDER files to work out which folder is what}. You might need to reset permissions afterwards, I'm not sure DriveBender sets permissions in the same way as DrivePool.

In theory, after you've done this on all drives, DrivePool will see all the files and they will already be distributed across the drives according to how DriveBender previously did it.

saitoh183

I have done the move from DB to DP when it was in free beta phase about a year ago. It went pretty smoothly. All i did was:

- uninstall DB

- Reboot

- Install DP

- create Pool

- go into each individual drive, into the DB pool part folder and Move (not copy) data to DP pool.

You shouldnt get a space error since your moving and not copying..its like moving a directory within the same drive. As for permissions, you should have no problem either since the files should take there permission from the pool. Once your done moving, just delete old DB pool part folders.

datageek

saitoh183 - did you move the files into the DP pool (back then it would have been into C:\ServerPool\ServerFolders etc, now it has its own drive letter), or into the PoolPart.* folders?

EDIT - I guess if there is at least 3TB space free across the 7 drives in the pool, then moving the data one disk at a time should be OK, i.e. Explorer/Teracopy will see the target drive as having enough space. However it could take a long time, as DrivePool will rewrite and redistribute all the files.

saitoh183

I did it straight to the pool ...back then i make a share to the pool and copied the content...it was pretty fast since DP will move stuff to where there is the most place it seemed to move it to same drive but in a different folder

kman1122

Becareful doing this. I just went from drivebender to drivepool and then had to go back because of problems with drivepool. Just make sure drivepool is working for you correctly before moving.

DrTone

Becareful doing this. I just went from drivebender to drivepool and then had to go back because of problems with drivepool. Just make sure drivepool is working for you correctly before moving.

LOL, good one!

JDThird

Doing it the "old fashioned" way.  I've got both products installed - and am currently removing the first 3TB drive from the drivebender pool.  Once the data is off and it's free, I'll add it to stablebit.  Then I'll do it for the next drive, etc...  Hoping the the stablebit app gives me better performance and stability (i.e. doesn't corrupt video files when copied to it).  I'll post results back here for anyone else who is looking at something similar. 

daveyboy37

Becareful doing this. I just went from drivebender to drivepool and then had to go back because of problems with drivepool. Just make sure drivepool is working for you correctly before moving.

LOL, good one!

Yep.. Thats the funniest post i have read on any forum all year.

davidg1

Becareful doing this. I just went from drivebender to drivepool and then had to go back because of problems with drivepool. Just make sure drivepool is working for you correctly before moving.

LOL, good one!

Yep.. Thats the funniest post i have read on any forum all year.

Im am not too sure why this is so funny, DP may not work for everyone. Like kman1122 I have also had to move away from Drivepool and Im now trying the other solution.

However as a paying Drivepool user, I would have hoped one would be allowed to express their views, without these kind of school yard responses. I guess we'll see.

daveyboy37

Well im sure kman wouldnt be offended, because he had never made any other post on the forum.Indeed he created his profile an hour or so before he made that post. (In a similar way to yourself). He too was obviously an avid DrivePool user and without ever asking a single question (or more likely never even had DrivePool installed) he decided that Drive Bender rocks and his only contribution to Drive Pool was his hit and run post. Personally i use DrivePool on my WHS and Drive Bender on my W7 machine. So therefore i have no axe to grind.... But what was his view??? What issues did he havewith DrivePool.. Guess we will never know!!