How to setup Snapraid and DrivePool in Windows

so let's take a look at how to set up a snap parade and pooling solution in Windows now this is gonna let you have one big volume with multiple drives with redundancy but compared to raid it'll still have files on every drive that you can use where I was afraid it's basically useless data if you lose above the values but if this one if you lost half your drives you want to have all your data but you'd still have some of it the other thing is due to this solution you won't have real-time redundancy so that means if you haven't done your sync yet you can't restore your files so if you copy a file to it immediately and then you lose that Drive it's gone also speeds pretty slow you're limited to the speed of a single Drive at any given time so to me this makes a really good backup solution because I can throw a ton of drives in if something really bad happens I still have some data and it's pretty easy to set up and use let's look at the software to use first thing that they use a snap right snap rates free and opensource works fine it's there it is the next thing you need something to pull it together what you don't need it but it makes it a lot easier because it makes it look like one big volume which makes a lot of stuff easier rather than just separate drives drive poor in my opinion is the best one helped out it was also Drive blender which works fine and there's a list I think is how you pronounce it which is free but it's pretty buggy and badness been updated for a while this is what I suggest it's 30 bucks but I don't get worth it if you're using it all the time first thing you want to do is you want to make sure you have a ton of on volumes now we could see here I have my boot drive which I'm not going to add to it though you can I have a 3 terabyte drive - 2 terabyte drives a 250 and a 200 I'm gonna leave this 200 unused - so I can show you how to do a restore later on on this 3 Toba is the biggest you always want your bigger strive to be parity because the biggest data drive can only be the size of the parity drive or smaller because the way that works is it takes files on any of these given drives and it makes a parity which is kind of the differences so it can restore it and stores it on this parity drive so it has to be the biggest so in any case you either have your one of your biggest drives has to be the pair of you it should be this one now it's currently my D Drive so what I want to do the first thing I want to do is make a volume here I don't want to using all my drives but what's going to be the peyote so we're gonna make it the EF and G drive so I'm going to just add them to the pool and this should take a couple of seconds and here it's only pretty quick and while this is happening we're going to go edit some snap rate settings what I first do is it comes with an example file and we're going to copy and paste it and then we're gonna take this file and we're going to just rename it to snap icons without the dot example and we're gonna edit it it'll complain but or I want to call it constant self con yes I then I'm gonna edit it I like using notepad plus plus but any text editing program will work fine we also need to add the rest of the drives to the pool we'll do that right now so here's the parity file anything with a little hashtag here or a pound symbol it means it's a comment it doesn't care what it is this is where your parody is so it's gonna be my D Drive so I'm gonna do D as it's not pretty dot there's gonna be a big file it's gonna just story a parody you could have more than one parody up to six but was only three dry with only four drives I'm not gonna use it it's just using it when you're five drives or more it's all up to how how much are you willing to take the chance of failure if a drive fails and the parity has an issue or fails you won't be able to get it content files are essentially where it stores the the data in it so the content tells it where the files are and stuff like that you don't have to have multiple but it basically it lets you have a redundancy so we're gonna store this on two of the data drive so you can start on all of them doesn't matter currently in the pool is e F and G so we're gonna just put it and we're gonna put it directly on the e Drive and we're gonna put it directly on the G Drive and no else for this test case I normally put one on each Drive but it really doesn't make a huge difference also normally when it's used in this array I put another name on it so it's has a different name both so the pool doesn't merge them all to the exact same thing next thing is data so this is telling it's a data drive as in the data name you can name them differently just D 1 D 2 D 3 all works and what file what file position so we're going to be using e f and g and it can do folders but i'm just gonna do the directly on the drive right now it will exclude here this is telling that what not to use so these are basically hidden windows files program folders the way this works you don't want to use it for files that change a lot things like these Program Files and stuff you want to use it mainly for backups and video storage things that don't really change so here's all the things not to use the default works fine for most users block size all these others are low level settings which don't really have to change it can also do smoke monitoring if you setup smoke control but we're not doing that today so now I've saved it and snap roads ready to go and it's ready to go and everything's a so now this pool is up and going and this pool options here lets you have it so you can have fire protection of duplicating files and that does let you have redundancy in Drive pool but it has the disadvantage of taking twice the space whereas this only uses the space of onedrive so now if I open up a new Explorer window I can see I got a new Drive pool right here it's almost 4 terabytes and it's the mixture of these 2 2 terabyte drives here and this 250 gig so let's do a file copy to it here are some my old video projects I've made and I'm just gonna copy these to this kind of long drive to that drive pool and we're gonna get the standard drive copying pop-up window and one interesting thing to look at is this can show you here for performance but you can also see it here and it basically uses one drive at a time so to copy it to whatever drive has the most space so it's only going to the two terabytes until they're almost full and then it'll go to the 250 other programs like drive blender lets you make it so it has the exact same percentage usage and other usage scenarios but this one just does it or is sitting most for one and you can see I'm getting almost 100 Meg's and I can get slightly faster but it's pretty good speed wise these are large files though and while this is copying let's take a look at what's on the actual drives so we could see anything of great here is hidden so these you normally wouldn't see anything on these drives but I see this pool pot some unique ID number and then in here these are all my files my files so if this Drive failed I could just go in here and get every single file and wanted off of all of it so even if this whole computer failed I could just copy all those files off these pull parts put it in one folder it's gonna be the exact same data that's what's on this drive pool also if you're on Linux you can use a free solution called mojo FS which would do the same thing as a drive pool as this stable bit drive pulling software here so now let's look at sinking so sinking is how it sets up its peyote and looks at the files so we want to run snapper exe in this folder well snap rate is as any wanted on the sink command after and then this will look at all the files and calculate the parity for it and I'll show you what's all is happening and tells you what's it's ignore and if there's issues or anything so if everything's working correctly it should operate fairly quickly at the speed of all the drives combined and I think there's some issue and the drives are just causing it to be slowly but it should finish relatively quickly so now the sync is done and you basically want to run the sync every time you make a major change in the filesystem some other things you might want to do as a scrub it'll automatically scrub some of the data at different times you can force it with certain commands to scrub all the data but when I can do that now scrubs basically make a checksum of all the data and tells you if there's been any corruption to your data which is good for keeping data the same over a long piece of time so now we're gonna make it so it looks like there's a failure so we're going to delete this volume here on this drive and we just lost some data and drive pool is complaining right now that does data missing so we're gonna say we put in new Drive so gonna go format this other Drive I have in here for this purpose and what used to be the G Drive is now being formatted and once it is it we're gonna have to do it so in order to do this we have to go edit the configuration file again and since our D Drive G Drive is gone we have a new G Drive because that's what Windows decides to assign it to so now we actually have to run the restore and now that we are the Ferriero we want to goes to the same sniper exe then we're going to use dash d as in d3 because d3 is the name of the drive that failed and I'm gonna just say fix and now it's going to be reading and restoring the missing files so if I go look and explore now for this PC this new volume we have here will have its missing files put back on it and this can take a while as we can see there's a lot of files going through it you know take a bit of time to a store all these files but in a little bit all the data will be restored and the other thing we can do is pretty soon because this drives gone we're going to just remove it from the pool and then once it's done we're gonna add it back again well we can add it now if we want and I could get all its data back so we can see what data is being was stored on you and we can see for example like the green screen test data which was on here so if we go back to Drive pool now the data is being put back so it took me about 18 minutes to finish was about 13 gigs of files it did take quite a bit of load on that hard drive just due to how it was writing small files is why it was so slow but if I go take a look at this drive if the new one the new volume it has all the files on it and all of these are filled with files so it means if I go to my drive pool it has all the data on it and you could see this guy has all the used data save with this guy is those 12 gigs of data and this guy does too so it has been restored correctly it does seem to do something funny with how it's adding it to a separate pool so if I go back to this pool and it seemed to act a little bit weird adding it to the phone Poole so we're just gonna force will move it from this pool and we're gonna add it to the other pool and now we've added it back so all the data is accessible in this pool now so this pool here should have roughly the same amount of space of both of these so it has 27 gigs used and both these guys have about 13 so that's about right so that's a quick look at snap right Linux looks pretty much the same basically use mojo FS instead of mojo FS instead of stable bit drive for very similar you do also remember to add it to the same pool recovery can take a while because it uses lots of small pipes and puts them together instead of big files and file systems are slow but hope that helps if you want to set up a basic snap right on windows setup

Channel: ElectronicsWizardry

Views: 27,705

Keywords: Snapraid, DrivePool, windows, raid, storage, backup, server, datahoarder, computer

Id: kDCMpVgZb4g

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2017