disParity » General Discussion

Automatic updates

(32 posts)
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  1. Roland
    Roland

    It is maybe not worth it compared to a full scan, except for us who protect remote drives which take ten minutes to scan over .

    Assuming you are talking about network drives, I'd like to understand more about this case. I just tried adding a network drive with 31,000 files on it to disParity. It took 8 seconds to scan over my gigabit LAN. That seems acceptably quick to me. In your case that takes 10 minutes, can you tell me:

    * How many files total on the network drive?
    * What is the total combined size of all files the network drive?
    * What is the network drive connected to? (Another PC, a dedicated NAS, etc.)
    * What type of network is between disParity and the drive (Wireless, Gigabit, etc.)

    Thanks!

    Posted 2 years ago #

  2. Porcus
    Member

    You've got mail.

    Only the blocks that changed get overwritten, the rest of the file is not re-written.

    Ah, good. Or, my bad. (Any reason for the 1GB size then? There is the issue of space not recovering ...)

    Ah yes, the dreaded "feature creep", the scourge of software projects everywhere. I hope disParity never falls victim to that.

    Depends on whether you think the line goes at Zawinski's law, or at a GUI ;-)

    Posted 2 years ago #

  3. Roland
    Roland

    Ah, good. Or, my bad. (Any reason for the 1GB size then? There is the issue of space not recovering ...)

    No, the 1GB size is arbitrary. Seemed like a nice round number at the time.

    What do you mean about space not recovering?

    Posted 2 years ago #

  4. Porcus
    Member

    What do you mean about space not recovering?

    When files are deleted.

    To take the argument to the impractical extreme: had all my files been 1GB .VOB's (they are routinely capped at 1 GB ... well disregard that they are 2 KB smaller than the .dat's), then deleting one would always make room for one ... right? (Not sure if this information is useful to me.)

    Posted 2 years ago #

  5. Roland
    Roland

    Yes, it's always the case that deleting a file leaves a hole in the parity that can be filled again later by another file of the same size or less. But I'm still not sure what that has to do with the 1GB size of the parityX.dat files.

    Also, in a typical multi-drive backup, that "hole" overlaps with valid file data from other drives, so it's not truly wasted space on the parity drive that could simply be removed from disk. The only case when that would be true is if no other drives overlapped with those same blocks.

    Posted 2 years ago #

  6. pcfix-it
    Member

    first time reader first time poster, btw will be brief as its off my phone.

    I love disparity for its SIMPLICITY so please just make it reliable more optimised and faster with a scheduled backup option and I will be more than happy

    thanks again.

    Mark @ pc fix-it

    Posted 2 years ago #

  7. Roland
    Roland

    Hi Mark,

    Thanks for your comments and welcome to the forum! Simplicity and ease of use will always remain my primary design goals for disParity. New features may get added over time, but my intention will be to make them as easy to use as possible as well as optional, i.e. if you don't want to use them, they won't get in the way of the basic backup features already in place.

    You mentioned "optimized and faster" as a desired improvement. I've already spent quite a bit of time trying to squeeze as much performance out of the code as I can; I feel at this point that disParity is pretty much constrained by hard disk I/O speeds. Nevertheless if you have specific ideas or areas where you think some performance gains could be had, please share them by all means!

    Thanks!

    Posted 2 years ago #

  8. pcfix-it
    Member

    I think you are.probably right I just noticed disparity does not seem to like making parity for lots of little files yet again excuse my brevity still in bed replying off my phone... love smart phones.

    Posted 2 years ago #

  9. Roland
    Roland

    Yes disParity is not optimized for the "lots of little files" case. It's designed for media servers, where most files are usually quite large.

    Posted 2 years ago #

  10. cybrsage
    Member

    I do not want disparity to default to automatic updates - what if I accidently delete files and not realize it until later? As it is now, I can recover them. An automatic update 5 minutes after a detected change removes that ability.

    Personally, I just manually run an update after I am done making changes...but having an update be able to be set to a timetable of my choosing would be nice - or having the ability to schedule verifications and such at times of my choosing would be nice as well.

    Posted 2 years ago #

  11. Cool1Net6
    Member

    I don't see why we can't have both methods of updating. Like Roland said, none of the other RAID systems are resilient to accidental deletions, and there are multiple utilities out there for recovering deleted files. However, neither of these methods seem that difficult to implement, and a simple warning stating that "Undelete is not available for real-time parity updates" should suffice.

    Or, use that "idle drive time window" feature to instead wait a few hours instead of just 5 minutes, therefore giving you a temporary undelete feature until the parity update kicks off.

    Posted 2 years ago #

  12. Klaatou
    Member

    once again, I prefere an updated parity rather than undeleting and beside undelete utilities you even have "file history" ( http://windows.microsoft.com/fr-be/windows-8/how-use-file-history ) to recover old files versions (ok it is not for big files)
    But Roland already said it will be optionnal so every body will be happy :)

    Posted 2 years ago #

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