file larger than largest drive free space.

stuarts

I am pretty sure I know what the answer is, but I will ask anyway. I have 5 2TB disks in a pool and have varying amounts of free space available on them. my backup application creates a large file. In some cases the backup file could be over 2TB, this is half of my current free pool space but more than twice the size of the free space on any one drive. From my understanding, this wont work.
Am I correct in this.
I intend to add some 3TB disks to the pool. If the backup starts to create a file on a drive with insufficient space, will drivepool migrate the file to a disk with sufficient free space if it sees the file grow too large.

If it wont, I am probably forced to go back down the RAID5 path, which then reduces my ability to grow the space as larger disks come along.

Stuart

Stuart

saitoh183

What are you using to create your backup?

stuarts

Acronis Trueimage has been my backup of choice for many years.

Shane

Hi stuarts, I use Acronis TrueImage on a bootable CD to backup customer drives to a share on the pool. Exactly this scenario arose, and TrueImage (per its default settings) automatically splits the backup and begins a new part file, which DrivePool automatically writes to the next available pooled disk with the most free space.

I can only assume that the TrueImage code must check the target destination for newly available space AFTER closing the first split file but BEFORE halting to ask the user for a new target location, so when DrivePool reports "hey still plenty of free space" the TrueImage software happily begins writing the next part.

stuarts

I have always just let it build a single file. Its easier to understand what it is doing. I might try setting up 100MB slices.

Shane

On the default setting (automatic), it'll build a single file if there's room and only split it if there's not.

Note that given the logistics of JBOD-esque arrays, it's best to minimise the number of disks a container object (e.g. a backup) is spread across, so you want to have as few splits as possible*. Duplication does not eliminate this effect.

^{*(unless you have some way of guaranteeing that all splits are written to the minimum possible number of disks required to hold the entire set)}

stuarts

Thats what I've always seen but previously its been on a RAID5 volume with 4 2TB disks in it. I've just set it up to split it into 5GB files so hopefully it will spread the files across the disks in the pool nicely.  I cant wait to have ver. 1.3 released so that I can set up seperate pools and have more control of placement.