disParity » General Discussion

Drive Bender, will it work with Disparity?

(14 posts)
  1. rust0r
    Member

    Roland,

    I know this has been asked before regarding "showing all drives as one", but I think this may actually work this time from what I've seen.

    Drive Bender: http://www.drivebender.com/index.php/features.html

    Basically what I've come to gather

    1) It will pool hard drives into one large storage drive, but will keep data whole on individual drives (not split as with Raid)
    2) It allows you to still show the drive letters to the system (allowing you to assign them in disparity config)
    3) All data additions/deletes/moves must take place on the large Pool once it has been created (deleting or adding to the individual drives themselves does not allow data to be reflected in the pool)

    Based on this, do you see any reason why Disparity wouldn't function as it does now? Any files you add/delete/move would be done through the pool, where by it automatically adds files to the drives it feels like based on space considerations. At that point, running an update or create, the config would recognize the individual drives for creation/updating and do so on the parity drive accordingly. The parity drive of course, would NOT be part of the pool.

    I've been running disparity for over 2 years now and the ONLY thing I can see being a problem, is if a drive fails, you would have to remove it, place a new fresh drive in, and run a "Disparity Recover" for the drive that failed, at that point disparity would manually replace all the files onto that new drive, the problem would come in because the recover process added them to the drive itself and not the drive pool. At this point I think the drive pool would need to be disbanded (which is possible through drive bender without any data loss, as all data is stored wholly on the drives and not spread across them) and then re-created to sync all data on the drives.

    What are you thoughts on this Roland? I know TONS of people have hounded you on this issue before and I know it's something that keeps many people from using disparity because they don't like having to manage drive space/data allocation (It almost kept me from running it years ago)

    If anyone else has any thoughts/input, feel free to add them, I'm hoping we can finally get a solution for drive-pooling with disparity. The best of both worlds :)

    Thank you for your time Roland

    Posted 3 years ago #
  2. rust0r
    Member

    So I've been doing some tests on some random hard drives, and it seems like the way it works is when adding a drive to the pool, it makes a directory that it then "junctions" into the larger pool. You can in fact add/remove files on the individual drives themselves and it will be reflected in the pool, contradictory to what I initially thought.

    It makes a folder like this: D:\{5ED2C01B-4BB9-4BA5-BEB5-E562233D4605}

    At this point a recovery wouldn't change anything, it would recover that folder as well, with all of your files inside of it and drive pooler would recognize all the files inside of it.

    Am I missing something or does this seem PERFECT for disparity?

    Posted 3 years ago #
  3. Roland
    Roland

    Sorry, I've been away for a while, but it looks like you've since answered your own question!

    Obviously, without getting up to speed on Drive Bender myself I can't predict how well it will interact with disParity. If, as you say, all the files are still just normal files on the data drives, just stored with different paths, and nothing particularly hinky is going on under the hood, in theory it should work. I suppose you could run in to trouble if Drive Bender creates and/or modifies lots of small files frequently on the data drives, which is the something disParity isn't designed to handle very well.

    Oh, and I really don't feel "hounded" about this topic at all. :) I know it's come up before, but I've always felt that drive pooling is way beyond the scope of the simple backup functionality disParity provides.

    If I have time, I might check out Drive Bender myself someday. It sounds like a good tool.

    Posted 3 years ago #
  4. Neostim
    Member

    I can say I've had it running for about a week now without any issues, Rust0r has been running it even longer (we're friends IRL). So for anyone that reads this in the future, Drive Bender + disParity is awesome!

    Posted 3 years ago #
  5. Klaatou
    Member

    Hello !
    To have all my data disks as one, I only go in the disk manager, adding a path to mount each one in a sub directory and I can share the mather one.
    I keep all drives letters in order to use disParity and everything is ok.
    I never had to recover a disk untill now with disParity ( :-) ) but I know I cannot have any problem as I can add/del/mod any thing in the mount directories or the actual disks.

    What Drive Bender really adds for this simple use ?

    Posted 3 years ago #
  6. Roland
    Roland

    Hi Klaatou, good question. I'm partly guessing here because I don't use Drive Bender, but I think the difference is that with your approach, you are still forced to have a separate folder path for each drive under your master drive. So for example, say your movie files are spread across multiple drives. You'll still need multiple movie folders, one for each drive, under your master shared drive. With Drive Bender, I believe you can combine all of your movie drives together so that they appear as a single folder rather than many. I agree the difference is not huge but it does make everything a little cleaner and simpler, especially when some of your family members may not be very tech savvy.

    Posted 3 years ago #
  7. Klaatou
    Member

    Yes Roland the fact I have one folder for each disk can be "sad" but I don't like not to know exactly where the files are located and I'm a bit affraid adding multiple layers of softwares between the system and them ;) I know, I'm old fashion and I don't trust a lot in windows ...
    Actually I like "my" solution with disParity, I only removed my mp3 disks from disParity (because of the big number of little files making grow the parity files need and time computing) they are now duplicated on another computer on the network, ok it needs even more disk space but they are always available on this other computer whatever I'm doing with the main one ;)

    Posted 3 years ago #
  8. Roland
    Roland

    Actually it's a really good idea anyway to keep an extra copy of your critically important data like mp3s, photos, etc. As I believe I mentioned in the readme, I really do not recommend relying on disParity as your sole backup for critical data like that. I keep an extra copy of my music drive as well as a secondary backup.

    But that said, I do also protect my mp3 drive with disParity. It's about 600GB of data and has over 20,000 mp3 files on it, and I really don't notice any problems with it. It takes maybe 20 seconds longer to scan that one drive during an update because of all the data, but that doesn't seem too bad, at least to me.

    Also, the parity "overhead" from all those mp3 files is still less than 1GB, which is negligible, especially since there are much larger drives than my music drive in the array. In other words, no extra space on the parity drive is actually taken up because of the mp3s.

    Posted 3 years ago #
  9. Klaatou
    Member

    So I test Drive bender with 3 disks I tried to protect with DisParity on a brend new 3TB

    With the 0.29 beta version I got no error and "Protected files: 0" on each disk :(

    With Disparity 0.20 I have a Fatal error :
    "Skipping K:\{44165669-2F8C-4507-8442-2FCC2770430D}\$RECYCLE.BIN because it is a Hidden folder.
    Fatal error: Le chemin d'accès spécifié, le nom de fichier ou les deux sont trop longs. Le nom de fichier qualifié complet doit comprendre moins de 260 caractères et le nom du répertoire moins de 248 caractères.
    Aborting."
    (= too long path names)

    So I don't see how we can managed to use Drive bender ...

    Posted 2 years ago #
  10. Roland
    Roland

    Well it sounds like you ran into the (very, very annoying) 260 character limit on file path names imposed by .NET. This is a hard problem to solve in the code, but it's possible to work around it by re-arranging or re-naming your files a bit to make full path names shorter.

    Do these drives work with disParity when you don't use Drive Bender?

    Posted 2 years ago #
  11. Klaatou
    Member

    yes they were ok before drive bender, but of course adding something as "{44165669-2F8C-4507-8442-2FCC2770430D}" is a lot .... and it seems I have many many too long files now :(

    Posted 2 years ago #
  12. Roland
    Roland

    OK I see, yes if Drive Bender moves all your files under a top folder with a long name, I see how that could cause issues if your paths were all quite long to begin with.

    At least this reminded me to make sure the new version behaves better when it encounters this problem. I've made a few tweaks, and with the next release it should cleanly skip past files and folders with path names that are too long without disrupting the rest of the backup.

    Longer term, there are ways to handle long paths properly, but they require bypassing the .NET Framework completely anywhere that files are accessed (which in a program like disParity is quite often, as you can imagine.) So, a lot of work. I've put it on the list for another day.

    Posted 2 years ago #
  13. Klaatou
    Member

    For now sharing the "drive bender big name folder" and accessing it thrue a network disk can work, a subst command would probably too.

    Of course if the new beta could not stop on this error will be very good ;)

    Posted 2 years ago #
  14. Klaatou
    Member


    Posted 2 years ago #

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