Migration from Drivebender and balancing?

JDThird

I'm migrating from drivebender.  I have 7 3TB drives in the pool.  I freed up one, installed drivpool, created a pool with that one drive, moved files to it, removed a second drive from drivebender, added it to drivepool, and am moving files more. I noticed the "unusable for duplication" section and it was a huge chunk - so as I dug, I found references to no method to balance drives, but I don't know if that's still the case with the current version or not.

If this is the case, what is the best way to go about getting myself migrated?  Should I only be copying a bit of data to the pool as I add drives?  Of the 21TB in my original pool, I had about 5TB free.  But since I had about 800GB I wanted to duplicate (TV shows) I want to make sure that however I end up getting myself set up here, I have capacity to do so.

Thanks for any suggestions!

John

saitoh183

Just add all your drives to the pool. DB will not see the different. Then on each of your drives go into the DB pool part folder (folders that are made up of numbers and letters) where you will find your data and just copy it to your pool drive and once your done just erase your old pool part folders and your done. DP will do the balancing as you copy to the pool.

JDThird

I was wondering about that.  I saw  in the docs that I can add a drive with data to the pool but that data isn't pooled, and that I can copy data directly to the drive letter and keep it "out of the pool" but if I copied instead to the letter of the drive pool, then it gets spread around.  

So all these drives with the existing data from drive bender (which I just uninstalled, so i'm left with all the individual drives and the GUID folder of the pool on each), if I add them to the pool, then cut/paste those folders from the specific drive letters to the pool drive's letter, it'll spread it out and pool it?  Once that's done can I use disk manager to remove the assigned drive letter from those drives so they're not available directly anymore, but only accessible through the drive letter which is the pool?

Thanks!

John

JDThird

I better clarify that, there were an awful lot of references to drive and drive letters...

My drivebender drive was D - it's gone.

My stablebit drive pool drive is E.

The remaining five drives I gave letters to that still have all the drivebender data are drives Q, R, S, T and U.

So if I just add Q through U to the pool, the data individually on them, from what I read in the manual, will be on them, but only individually through each drive letter it's physically on since it's not in the pool.  But then if I cut and paste data from each drive (Q through U) as I go to paste it to drive E (the pool) it would then be spread across the pool as anything would, correct?  That would simplify things greatly for me.

Then could I go into drive management and remove drive letters Q through U and just leave the single access point of the pool's drive letter, E, to use in the future?

That sounds a lot easier to follow the question, when I spell it out in detail like that

Shane

You've got it exactly right.

Note that currently, you can only change whether duplication is enabled for a folder when that folder is shared via the dashboard (use "Add a folder", not the similar "Add a folder to the Pool", and "Browse" to find the folder you want to share).

However, since folders retain their duplication status whether shared or not, you can change an un-shared folder's duplication just by sharing it, turning on/off duping, then stop sharing it.

(also note: folders inherit any new duplication status of their shared parent, if any)