FlexRAID on WHS

When trying to restore data delete through the share, the only solution is to restore not to the original DRU path, but through the share.

D'oh! I can't believe I didn't think about doing that. Guess I was a little tired at the time. You're absolutely right. Why do I need to restore to a specific drive, exactly where it was previously? Just put it back onto the share and let WHS do it's thing. I'll need to test this out, but I suspect it'll work just fine.

The restore "worked" when restoring to the share. However, I deleted a couple of MP3s from my library and it restored differently than I was expecting. I set the restore as follows:

restorePath=1|\\Media-server\Music

It's restoring to:

\\Media-server\Music\fs\1G\DE\shares\Music\

...and then it's finally putting it into the proper child folders.

Is there a way to get it to skip the "fs\1G\DE\shares" part?

skirge01 wrote:The restore "worked" when restoring to the share. However, I deleted a couple of MP3s from my library and it restored differently than I was expecting. I set the restore as follows:

restorePath=1|\\Media-server\Music

It's restoring to:

\\Media-server\Music\fs\1G\DE\shares\Music\

...and then it's finally putting it into the proper child folders.

Is there a way to get it to skip the "fs\1G\DE\shares" part?

Ah, I had to do that for safety reasons.
I guess you could simply move everything under "\\Media-server\Music\fs\1G\DE\shares\Music\" to "\\Media-server\Music" in one simple step.
I do understand, nevertheless, how it would have been nice to skip that step.

Any chance of offering some sort of option for this situation? It would obviously help immensely with WHS restores.

skirge01 wrote:Any chance of offering some sort of option for this situation? It would obviously help immensely with WHS restores.

I guess I could.
Make a post in the feature request forum so I can keep track of this request.

As I began to write that post, I started to think about the implications, which I have a feeling were the reasons you have it restore as it currently is.

Since we don't know what exactly is going to be restored, it would be very difficult to know where the proper restore path should be. If I'm only restoring a handful of files from a single directory, it seems very simple to say, "I want to restore to \\mediaserver\music\classical\beethoven\greatest hits\".

As soon as you get beyond a single directory, you're running the risk of accidentally overwriting data.

skirge01 wrote:As I began to write that post, I started to think about the implications, which I have a feeling were the reasons you have it restore as it currently is.

Since we don't know what exactly is going to be restored, it would be very difficult to know where the proper restore path should be. If I'm only restoring a handful of files from a single directory, it seems very simple to say, "I want to restore to \\mediaserver\music\classical\beethoven\greatest hits\".

As soon as you get beyond a single directory, you're running the risk of accidentally overwriting data.

Well, in the case of WHS, the operation is fairly safe.
This is because any given file in the WHS pool would have a unique share path.

So, if you write all your files through the share, then restoring them to the share at the root level is safe.

Even beyond that, the operation will still be fairly safe as I won't allow it to override existing files.

FYI, new builds uploaded.
You can use the Web UI upgrade release to update your installation.

I have a pc running vista32 buisness that I want to use as a media server. I have an 8 port sata card that currently has 5 1TB disks connected. Could I use vista to create a dynamic disk using 4 of the disks and stripe data across them to create 1 large 4TB drive, and then use the remaining drive as a parity drive for flexraid to protect the 4TB dynamic drive?

Tom

tkole wrote:I have a pc running vista32 buisness that I want to use as a media server. I have an 8 port sata card that currently has 5 1TB disks connected. Could I use vista to create a dynamic disk using 4 of the disks and stripe data across them to create 1 large 4TB drive, and then use the remaining drive as a parity drive for flexraid to protect the 4TB dynamic drive?

Tom

No, you cannot do that.
If you span 4 drives into a 4TB JBOD or stripe, the whole JBOD or stripe will be a single point of failure (instead of 4).

I assume, you have to have the host running for the rsynch schedule to run, correct? Do you have to have the client running for an email to be sent when rsynch is completed? That being said, I obviously have to have a user running on the server at all times for the host to be running, correct? I always thought that you log out of the server normally. Sorry for the basic questions. Thanks.

icon123 wrote:I assume, you have to have the host running for the rsynch schedule to run, correct? Do you have to have the client running for an email to be sent when rsynch is completed? That being said, I obviously have to have a user running on the server at all times for the host to be running, correct? I always thought that you log out of the server normally. Sorry for the basic questions. Thanks.

You need to have both the Host and WebUI running to make use of the scheduling feature.

The user right will be whatever user started the Host.
So, you can log out after and the Host will still run under your user right.

If you only want FlexRAID (Host and client) running only at your own scheduled time, you will need to script it.
Read here: http://www.openegg.org/forums/posts/list/67.page

Thanks. So basically I need to keep the host, client and webui running for all the scheduling and emailing to work.

I still don't have the hang of the WHS system yet. I know if I run these programs as the admin directly on the WHS and then log out, it shuts down all the programs.

Thanks again for your help.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 28/03/2009 00:01:43

icon123 wrote:Thanks. So basically I need to keep the host, client and webui running for all the scheduling and emailing to work.

I still don't have the hang of the WHS system yet. I know if I run these programs as the admin directly on the WHS and then log out, it shuts down all the programs.

Thanks again for your help.

For client, you have the choice between the command line client or WebUI.
It is one of the two, but not both.

The command line client has no built-in scheduling or email feature.
Only the WebUI does.

Scripting is only supported on the command line client.

There is a thread out there about making the Host application a service.
The WebUI can also be make a service, but I will have to give the instructions to do so.

Thanks. Maybe it's just me and being old school, but services would seem to make a lot of sense for something that needs to be ran all the time. Regardless, I appreciate your help and software. I just started using it, we will see how it goes. I have my first scheduled rsynch in about an hour. Unfortunately, for such a simlple program, I wish there was an easier way to install and run the software, something more straightforward. I'm not having any problems (so far) understanding the concept of FlexRaid or how to set it up or administer it. Just having a hard time getting to the point of acutally using it. I wish there was just one program that ran and installed a scheduler, etc. I know, I have been spoiled in the past.

Anyhow, keep up the good work. If it wasn't for this program, I probably would have had a 2nd box running unraid.

Hi
Can I include tombstones in FlexRaid protection scheme?
I would like to be protected from WHS system hard drive failure. Guys from MS WHS forum suggest to reinstall WHS if system drive fails. However, in this case it may take days to recreate tombstones if you have several terabytes of data on other drives. Just too long. Plus I installed and configured a lot of software on WHS already, don't want to do that again.

So I was thinking of
1. Making Acronis image of C: and D: drive without D:\DE\shares folder
2. Including D:\Shares (tombstone folder) in FlexRaid DRU

Then if my system drive fails I would
1. Restore Acronis image on a new drive. I make an assumption that the image is current as I don't plan to do significant changes to the system after making an image of the drive
That would involve changing HDD ID in registry so WHS would recognize it as a system drive. I saw someone wrote about successful change of system drive in WHS.
2. Restore data in D:\DE\shares and tombstones in D:\Shares using FlexRaid.

I believe this way I would have tombstones pointing to the locations from the last snapshot taken by FlexRaid, and assuming I do rsynch frequently enough I should not have any major problem.

What do you think?

And Brahim, thanks a lot for great software!

What's the size of the tombstone folder?

If it is not large enough, I would advise to just do a 1:1 backup of that folder.

I am not sure now. As I read more guys from social.microsoft.com tell that tombstones are to be in D:\folders\{000.....} folder, but there is an inconsistency. There are only few small files in this folder, 27K total and I as I have read there must be a 4 kilobyte tombstone file for each file stored in WHS shares. I have 2000 files in shared folders and I should see 2000 tombstones. Instead I see all my 2000 files in D:\shares folder and their size is the same as real file size on server. Explorer says that my D: drive has 300 MB size which is correct but free space on it is 3 TB which is total free space on all my drives.

So as I understand tombstone is much more advanced than old Windows .lnk shortcut and/or WHS file system is too smart. As I see it tombstone can't be seen as a shortcut file, it is seen as an actual file it points to. I need to investigate it more. If it is true I guess it will be difficult for FlexRaid to backup a tombstone unless it somehow hacks WHS filesystem.

So if you don't have WHS system I think I need to tell more details. D:\Shares folder (where I still believe tombstones are located) has 1.5 TB size which is total size of all my files on all my 5 drives. Each file in this folder looks exactly as file I initially copied to \\WHS\Shares and D: drive is 300 GB in size.
I guess I need to boot another operating system to see what tombstone is like, will boot that PC from Acronis CD or Linux in the next few days.
Too bad WHS can't backup itself.

Ok, I see what tombstones are now.

They are hard links and junctions that WHS uses to create the network view.
It is indeed much trickier to backup the hard links and junctions without backing up the actual files.
I can come up with something that does the backup without backing up the actual files, but that would be something outside of FlexRAID.
Plus, I am working on FlexRAID-View, which should make things much more simpler.

Brahim wrote:

skirge01 wrote:The restore "worked" when restoring to the share. However, I deleted a couple of MP3s from my library and it restored differently than I was expecting. I set the restore as follows:

restorePath=1|\\Media-server\Music

It's restoring to:

\\Media-server\Music\fs\1G\DE\shares\Music\

...and then it's finally putting it into the proper child folders.

Is there a way to get it to skip the "fs\1G\DE\shares" part?

Ah, I had to do that for safety reasons.
I guess you could simply move everything under "\\Media-server\Music\fs\1G\DE\shares\Music\" to "\\Media-server\Music" in one simple step.
I do understand, nevertheless, how it would have been nice to skip that step.

That is a problem. You cannot just move or copy everything to "\\WHS\Music" . WHS doesn't allow that, you would get access violation. Once a file in C:\fs\XX\DE\shares folder has been deleted the only operation WHS allows on this file is to delete it from \\WHS\yourshare. You will see "file conflict" message until that happens. Even if the file was successfully restored to the same location, WHS still blocks it. The only way that I know to make WHS use restored files - delete them from \\WHS\yourshares\ and copy restored files to \\WHS\yourshares\. I tested this multiple times - this is always a case, you have to delete files before copying.

Now suppose I have hundreds of folders in \\WHS\Music. Most of them have several subfolders with 10+ files in it. Sometimes there may more directory levels, like \Music\Style\Artist\SPs\SP-Name\. The files in these subfolders will be spread across different physical drives. So in order to put restored files where they belong I would have to go through all these hundreds of subfolders recursively and delete files that have been located on restored drive.

It is too time consuming and error prone task to perform. So, there is a need for a tool that would allow to copy/move directory structure to network share deleting files before attempting to overwrite. So far I could not find such tool. It is probably not very difficult to write such a program but I understand this might be out of scope of FlexRaid. But without this tool restore process on WHS is going to be too difficult. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Restoring files directly to original WHS network share location, as skirge01 suggested, would probably make things easier for users, we would not need such tool. Restore process, however, would have to delete files from share before restoring.