disParity » Announcements

Version 0.40 beta available

(8 posts)

  1. Roland
    Roland

    It's been quite a while since the last update to disParity. Today I'm making a new version available with the oft-requested "automatic update" (or "unattended backup") feature. Due to the complexity of changes in this version and the likelihood of new bugs, I've decided to release this version strictly as an optional beta version, at least for now. This means previous versions of disParity will not prompt you to upgrade; you must manually download and install the beta. Once you are running the beta, however, you will get the automatic in-application prompt when further updates to the beta are released.

    Changes in this update are listed in more detail in the release notes.

    Please visit the beta page to download version 0.40.

    If you encounter any issues with the new beta, please post them as a new topic under the "Bug Reports" forum, rather than replying here. Thanks!

    Posted 1 year ago #

  2. pccfatman
    Member

    Ok my experience with .40 thus far

    Set to notify of changes, working as expected
    Set to update after 1 minute of inactivity, working as expected
    Changed the files on the drive when update in progress, it saw the changes and ran another update after 1 minute of inactivity

    Made no changes to the drive but browsed to a directory and got properties of a file, disParity saw this as a change and re-scanned that drive after 1 minute (could this be due to drive bender I wonder or is getting file properties an actual change to the drive), at any rate it scanned and found no changes.

    I will post anything else I find as I continue to try and break it :)

    Ed

    Edit: So it seems that even accessing a file on my drive is detected as a change and disParity will rescan that drive. I will do more testing and see if this is related to how windows access data or if maybe Drive Bender is writing files to the drive when I access things. I do have DP set to ignore *.$DRIVEBENDER files as those do change frequently

    Edit Again: This appears to only happen when I access files via my Drive Bender pool, if I share the individual drives directly and perform the same tests DP does not see any changes to the drive. I played a movie and got properties on it from both my computer via network share and directly from the server itself using both the individual drive and then the same file from the pool. This only happens on the pool so I will look into DB and see what's going on there.

    ____________
    So it would appear that most of these drive changes are definitely related to Drive Bender. I'm not sure how to get around this issue other than to set the scan time to a higher number to reduce the number of scans being performed. If I find a solution, I'll post back for anyone else using DB with disParity
    ________

    On a brighter note .40 seems to be working smashingly :)

    Thanks Roland for all your hard work

    Posted 1 year ago #

  3. Roland
    Roland

    I don't use Drive Bender myself, but from what you describe it does sound like something it is doing is triggering a Windows file system "changed" event whenever a file is accessed. I can confirm that this does not normally happen when accessing a file directly via Windows.

    So yeah, as far as I can see, the worst that can happen from this is that if you have automatic updates in the "update the backup after X minutes of inactivity" mode, then disParity will wind up scanning a drive more often than usual. Of course when it scans the drive and finds no changes, it won't actually update anything. So, it seems pretty harmless to me.

    Also, just a reminder, to report issues with 0.40, please start a new topic under Bug Reports, don't reply to this thread. Thanks!

    Posted 1 year ago #

  4. pccfatman
    Member

    Edited, starting a new thread

    Posted 1 year ago #

  5. Arbies
    Member

    Hi Roland - Been using 0.39 for a while now and looking forward to the official 0.40 release. The 0.40 beta features look awesome from what I've read. Keep up the great work!

    Posted 1 year ago #

  6. cybrsage
    Member

    What happens if a drive starts to die and the files become corrupt and therefor are changed from the originals? Will DP see the change and then run an update, thereby overwriting the good parity with the newly corrupted ones?

    Posted 1 year ago #

  7. Roland
    Roland

    If a drive is "starting to die" it can affect the behavior of the drive in all sorts of strange ways, so it's hard to predict what will happen in all possible cases. In my experience, when a drive is beginning to fail, you are most likely to just get full on I/O errors when trying to access a file or folder, rather than being able to read the file with no errors but still get corrupted data back. Nevertheless I'm sure that's possible in certain failure scenarios.

    Keep in mind that disParity will only think the file has changed if its length or last modified timestamp have changed. If the file contents have become corrupted but those attributes have not changed, disParity will not update it.

    But yes, in general, there are risks associated with using the automatic update feature, which is why it is disabled by default. For example if you accidentally delete file data and don't realize it before the automatic update kicks in, you won't be able to recover the data.

    Posted 1 year ago #

  8. cybrsage
    Member

    Gotcha, thanks!

    Posted 1 year ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.