The current state of FlexRAID

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 31/10/2008 18:11:42

I hope nothing bad has happened to prevent Brahim from continuing Flexraid.

Having said that, what is everyone else doing to replace Flexraid as their backup solution? I'm having a bit of trouble deciding what to do because I have 8 HDD's in 2 different sizes. I really don't want to set up a server, but there doesn't seem to be any software that will let me combine 2 HDD sizes in a RAID/backup configuration on Windows (except doing 2 separate RAID configs, which seems like a waste).

bigbud120 wrote:I hope nothing bad has happened to prevent Brahim from continuing Flexraid.

Me too. It is definitely odd that he vanished completely like that. Before he would at least drop in every few days with a comment. It makes you wonder...

bigbud120 wrote:Having said that, what is everyone else doing to replace Flexraid as their backup solution?

I wrote my own. It's really not that hard if you've got some basic coding skills.

ObjetDart wrote:I wrote my own. It's really not that hard if you've got some basic coding skills.

I wish I could write my own, but I have no coding skills at all.

I still use Windows over Linux due to being too stubborn to learn a new OS.

Is your program something you're looking at making available? I'd be interested to hear more about it.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 02/11/2008 22:57:23

Yes, other people are welcome to use it. It's written in C# and only supports Windows. I feel bad about hijacking Brahim's public forum and using it to promote my own competing product, so I'll just say, send me an email at rolandv@gmail.com if you want to try it out, and I'll send you more details.

Update:

I've set up a simple web forum for people using my new utility. There is a download link in the Announcements section.

http://www.vilett.com/disParity/forum/

ObjetDart wrote:Yes, other people are welcome to use it. It's written in C# and only supports Windows. I feel bad about hijacking Brahim's public forum and using it to promote my own competing product, so I'll just say, send me an email at rolandv@gmail.com if you want to try it out, and I'll send you more details.

But he didn't open the source code, so a competing product for those left hanging, versus an extension of his own work, was the result.

Brahim shouldn't mind. People need something to protect their data. Your product is an in-between until some support of Flexraid is possible again.

Reading over where he is/was taking Flexraid, I noticed the one engine would allow 65,536 targets. That number doesn't even include the parity targets, just data targets. There's "flex"-ible, and then there's just plain _WHY_?

Who was ever going to test such a configuration? (Just so it's clear, Flexraid, like any raid, is most effective if each data target or parity target is its own drive. It would allow 65K+ targets, and 65K+ (or unlimited?) parity targets, and allow 65K+-1 failures. Who has 65,000, let alone 131,000, drives sitting around to test this engine out? I don't understand putting a second of effort into this code without getting the previous code fully functional... I think this shows Flexraid didn't have good focus)

I mean, if you have limited time to devote to a project, don't:

1) NOT release the source code
2) put in time limits
3) make future capabilities unrealistic if your time's limited

I believe the lesson learned in this experience is to not agree to test an open source project without the source code already released for what you are testing. It's a waste of our time to bother.

I always figured Brahim, by refusing, would either:

1) take it commercial (broken promise)
2) drop support before releasing any source code (broken promise)

FWIW - I limited my testing of the project due to refusal to release source code. The second I read he was adding time limits, and still refusing to remove that, it was crystal clear to me he was wasting our time.

(I never saw any time limits, but that was because I wasn't testing it...)

If Brahim does resurface, do yourself a favor and don't test any future releases without source code.

Besides, I've bought some hardware raid controllers, so I cannot say I desire software raid again anymore. Having a metadata system inside of Windows though would have been nice.

I was perfectly happy with older versions of flexraid. I don't require automation, and I only do incremental backups of 4 drives every couple of weeks. command line interface is fine for me.

For now I've got my most important data just mirrored onto an external.

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 03/11/2008 15:05:50

Just to let people know, I was looking back over the Flexraid thread in the AVS Forum and I looked at spectrumbx's (Brahim) public profile and he is still active on those forums. His last post was made in the last 24 hours. So I've PM'd him and am hoping for a reply, particularly if it is on these forums.

I see other people from this forum are still posting in the same thread, so I imagine Brahim has cut Flexraid out of his life completely. I wasn't convinced that Flexraid was dead until I saw Brahim still posting on AVS, so I guess I'll now move on to greener pastures.

I sent Brahim a PM last week stating that I would be willing to take over FlexRAID and run it as an opensource project, alonside my FlexMC project which I mentioned earlier in this thread. So far I haven't heard anything back (I don't think he has even read the PM), but hopefully he will decide to turn over the sourcecode and let the community run with it instead of letting it die.

mikester wrote:I sent Brahim a PM last week stating that I would be willing to take over FlexRAID and run it as an opensource project, alonside my FlexMC project which I mentioned earlier in this thread. So far I haven't heard anything back (I don't think he has even read the PM), but hopefully he will decide to turn over the sourcecode and let the community run with it instead of letting it die.

I hope he takes you up on your offer. I've PM'd him on these forums and never heard back, but I'm surprised that he has stayed active on the AVS forums and not bothered to explain what the situation is. I don't hold much hope in hearing back from my AVS PM either considering that the Flexraid thread is still active on that site and he isn't participating.

I wrote a PM too... and asked for some news.

It really is a shame to see the project die. It would have been perfect for my needs. Unraid doesn't make sense in my setup I do NOT want to have a dedicate server when there would be no need for one.

My last posts may have been a little premature.

I did get an answer to my AVS Forum PM.

http://www.openegg.org/forums/posts/list/59.page