disParity » General Discussion

Thank you for a great product! And feature requests...

(9 posts)

  1. adrianf
    Member

    Thank you for a wonderful product. I had tried out a couple of other options but none of them did what I wanted them to do so easily so I jumped on disParity several months ago.

    I know it's been a while since a new version has been released so I'm sure there's some stuff going on behind the scenes but I know the two features I'd love to see added have been asked for by others:

    1/ Automated updating. I'd love to see disParity do the updates on its own without having to hit "Update All" from time to time.

    2/ The ability to ignore (a) specific directory (or directories). For instance, I run 5x4TB drives in my system (1 is the parity drive, obviously); I have some content that is not in need of being backed up so I'd love the option to save the space for other things that are required. As it stands, I've got around 1.7TB still available on my drives but only around 300GB of space left on the parity drive.

    Thanks again for an awesome product.

    Posted 2 years ago #

  2. Roland
    Roland

    Hi Adrian,

    thanks for your post. I'm glad to hear you are finding disParity useful. I've had to put development on hold this summer to focus on work and other things. Now that winter is coming, I expect to have a lot more free time soon to devote to disParity.

    Yes, automatic updates will be in the next version I put out.

    Being able to config which directories on a drive are protected is also definitely on my list. I certainly see how that could be useful.

    However based on your post I just want to make sure you understand that adding 300GB of new data to a drive won't increase your parity usage *unless it is the drive with the most data in the system.* Or put another way, if the drive that has the 300GB of extra data on it has less data overall on it than some other drive, then removing that 300GB from the backup won't change the amount of parity space used.

    Maybe I can explain it better with an example. Let's say this is the amount of data on your 4 4TB data drives:

    D: 3.0 TB
    E: 2.7 TB
    F: 3.3 TB
    G: 2.4 TB

    The amount of space used on the parity drive will be 3.3TB, because that's how much space is used on F: and it is the "most full" drive in the system.

    Now let's say the 300GB you don't want backed up is on D:. If you could remove it from the backup, it wouldn't change anything on the parity drive, which would still use 3.3TB. The only way you could affect parity usage is if the 300GB were on the F: drive. But in that case, you could, for example, move it to the G: drive, bring G: up to 2.7TB, and reducing F: down to 3.0TB. In that case you would free up 300GB on the parity drive.

    Hope that helps. Perhaps you understand all this already and I'm explaining the obvious, but I just want to make sure because sometimes this point confuses people.

    Posted 2 years ago #

  3. adrianf
    Member

    Hi Roland,

    Thank you for your quick response.

    Indeed, disParity is a wonderful little program and is a great way of protecting my data in the event of losing a drive (ideally, SMART will let me know that a drive is on its way out beforehand but it is nice to know that my data can be recovered without fear of losing everything).

    Thank you for getting the automatic updates feature ready for the next version that gets rolled out. I'm looking forward to this because I think it's the only feature that was missing that I felt was imperative.

    As for the balancing of drives and how it reflects on the parity drive, thank you for the refresher. It makes perfect sense that the largest drive in the system will be the same size as the parity drive after updating.

    Cheers!

    Posted 2 years ago #

  4. sub0
    Member

    With regards to this feature request:
    2/ The ability to ignore (a) specific directory (or directories).

    disParity can already do that since its first release.

    Just configure disParity to protect a single (top level) folder on a drive. All other folders outside of that will be ignore.

    Example:
    E:\MyMovies\
    E:\other stuff\
    E:\other other stuff\

    If disParity is configured to protect E:\MyMovies\ (and everything under it), the "..\other stuff\" folders will be ignored and not protected.

    and yes, thanks Roland for a very wonderful and useful software.

    Posted 2 years ago #

  5. Roland
    Roland

    Yes that's true, thank you for pointing that out. However it's pretty limited as it stands. It can handle the case you describe, but for example if someone wanted to protect both "E:\My Movies\" and "E:\other stuff\" but NOT "E:\other other stuff", there's no way to do that, at least not without either moving folders around on the data drive, or playing clever tricks with links.

    Posted 2 years ago #

  6. ajiau
    Member

    I've simply created an "array" folder in the root of each drive. Only those folders are part of the parity array. I then create whatever folder I want within the array folders. (Movies, TV Shows, MP3 etc). To me this makes perfect sense and has worked really well when I have large temporary files I don't want to protect.

    My 2 cents, I'd like to see background updating as a top priority.

    PS: Awesome tool you have here. Saved me more than once already. Surprised it's still free actually. ;-)

    Posted 2 years ago #

  7. Klaatou
    Member

    beware, adding folders can come to the max lenght path error (.net lib limitation :( )
    (I was able to reduce path lenght using ntfs symbolic links)

    Posted 2 years ago #

  8. ajiau
    Member

    Use smaller file names :-)

    I have things like G:\array\TV Shows\Foo Bar\Season 1\Foo Bar S01E01 Episode Name.mp4

    Roland : Note that the 260 char limit CAN be worked around. This guy's done most of the work already : http://zetalongpaths.codeplex.com/

    Posted 2 years ago #

  9. Roland
    Roland

    Yes, I know it can be worked around, with enough effort. I've said so several times, haven't I?

    And yes I know various people have made attempts to write replacements for the System.IO.* namespace that solve the issue. But whenever I've reviewed them in the past, they always seem to be incomplete. They've addressed the basic functionality but left many of the lesser-used methods unimplemented. As I'm sure you can imagine, disParity makes extensive use of .NET I/O methods throughout the application. Replacing all of that code with a new implementation, whether it's mine or someone else's, will be a big project regardless.

    Posted 2 years ago #

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