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[InflatableMouse]

http://blog.division-m.com/2013/09/07/drive-bender-v2/

[marko]

VSS isn't working

[InflatableMouse]

You have the v.2 beta installed?

[marko]

Nope. Not confident enough to run beta Drivebenders. I need it to 'just work', and v1.9.5.0 is doing exactly that. No issues at all.

When I saw your post, I was like... "oooh, is VSS coming?" and clicked the link....

First paragraph, oh my, VSS support, now we're talking.... until I got to: "At this stage we have decided to move on with the other stages of the v2 development and beta releases, while we continue to work on these VSS issues in the background."

So the wait goes on.

[InflatableMouse]

Well "not working" isn't entirely correct.

At the very least v2 will support pool snapshots, snapshot mounting and snapshot management.

I think that is a good start.

[jmone]

I liked the sync between multiple pools idea.  If you had unlimited B'Width and lots of disk we could all just share merge our pools!

[marko]

Well "not working" isn't entirely correct.

At the very least v2 will support pool snapshots, snapshot mounting and snapshot management.

I think that is a good start.

I'm not sure what benefit these are to me? To the best of my knowledge, I've never needed them before. I just want my backup software to work (without assigning all of the drives their own letters in Windows.)

I liked the sync between multiple pools idea.  If you had unlimited B'Width and lots of disk we could all just share merge our pools!

[InflatableMouse]

I'm not sure what benefit these are to me? To the best of my knowledge, I've never needed them before. I just want my backup software to work (without assigning all of the drives their own letters in Windows.)

I use Macrium Reflect to make file & folder backups of several folders, including all my music files. These backups are working fine on pooled drives, but they give an error message about VSS. Here's part of the log:

Code: [Select]

Creating Volume Snapshot - Please Wait
Failed To Create Volume Snapshot. Result Code: 0x80042306
ERROR: COM call "m_pVssObject->BackupComplete(&pAsync)" failed.
- Returned HRESULT = 0x80042301
- Error text: VSS_E_BAD_STATE

So while its true you don't really 'need' volume snapshotting you'd gain some important benefits with VSS support.

Basically when you make a volume snapshot the state of all the files as they are at that moment is saved. All changes from that moment on are saved separately from their snapshot state. Not the complete files, just the bits that have changed. This means that when you take a backup of a snapshot volume and files are changed during the backup, the changes are not made to the files being backed up but they go to a separate area on disk. This increases backup reliability. Without snapshots, you risk loosing changes if they are made during the backup and a verify will fail because files have changed while a backup was ongoing.

Another important thing is differential backup speed and reliability. Currently, differential backups of a folder on a pooled drive works but its slow and archaic. It needs to rely on the archive attribute being set on files and make a bit by bit comparison with the backed up version. It can then save the changes in a differential backup. With a volume snapshot, a backup simply 'asks' the OS for the changes since the previous snapshot and backup those changes without having to rely on file attributes and a bit comparison.

While I've seen backups of my Music folder fail (file backup on a pooled drive, no VSS), I've never seen any of my system drive backups fail (image backup of a single disk with VSS support).

[jmone]

FYI - the V2 Beta is out and for my sins I'm part of their Beta team.  Will advise how it goes!

[InflatableMouse]

Cool!

Any word on how long the beta period will run for?

[jmone]

Hard Disk Sentinel /DB reported one of my 4TB Hitachi drives was starting to reallocate bad sectors all of a sudden (up to 900 in the last couple of days) + a couple of "Failure Predicted !!! Attributge : Raw Read Error Rate" errors.

I'm running the latest beta of DB (2.0.2.6) so I did a "remove drive" and for this process and DB no longer takes the Pool Offline   We could continue to watch Movies etc just fine during the process though when it finished the process the pool unmounted and I had to reboot.  All came up fine (time to add a new HDD and RMA the old one).

I like it when "stuff" works as it should!

Edit - spoke to soon...found and reported a bug in DB Beta 2.0.2.6 in that you can not "see" and "non-pooled" drives... so you can not "add" a drive with this version.

[jmone]

FYI - V2 just out.  Lots of bug and GUI fixes.
http://community.division-m.com/index.php?/topic/1294-drive-bender-v2100-released/

[marko]

Thanks for the tip...

Couldn't see any info on their site...

Will a 1.xxx license work with v2.xxx?

1.9.5.0 appears to be working well for me... reasons to upgrade other than staying current?

[jmone]

I've gone through all the beta versions and while I did not have any issues there were a bunch of bugs fixed around removing / adding drives etc etc as well as the GUI update (which I don't really care about).  There have also been a big driver change + a unified installer across Win/WHS etc.  I'd suggest updating and it should be fine but there is a "Driver Utility" if there are probs to remove the "Gen 4 Driver" then Install the "Gen 5 Driver' if needed.

Have a look at the change log (heaps of changes)

I don't think there is any upgrade cost at all (I certainly did not see any).

[jmone]

Worth setting a Windows Restore Point just in case.

[6233638]

It seems that a Drive Bender license is a "lifetime" license, so you shouldn't have to buy a new one or upgrade.
I did have to contact support before my license would reactivate though, as I failed to deactivate it before reinstalling Windows the last time.
 
It was taken care of within two minutes of emailing support.
 
I seem to be getting a lot of "missing folder" and "attempts to repair the folder failed" errors showing up in the logs right now, which is concerning. I don't think it properly imported one of my drives, or is having difficulty with long filenames.

[6233638]

Well, I managed to resolve my "missing folder" errors.
What I ended up doing was freeing up some more space on the drive which was giving me these errors (DB had managed to completely fill the drive so that only 4KB was left!) and ran chkdsk on it as instructed to by the DB support team.
 
I'm not sure why, as there were no errors listed, but after doing that, I was able to repair the pool and all but 13GB was listed as being part of the pool, with no more errors showing up.
I'm still not sure why 13GB was still being listed as being non-pool data though.
 
But in the end, I was still having problems with a number of applications having incompatibilities with Drive Bender.
Scheduled backups worked, but the non-stop backup feature in Acronis did not, for example.
A couple of other applications refused to create files on the pool for some reason - and creating the pool in the first place changed the permissions on a number of folders to admin-only, which is something I had to fix.
 
So while I love the idea of having drives pooled together to maximize available free space and potentially speed up disk access, it just didn't work out for me.
 
At least this time I haven't had the nightmare I went through last time I tried to remove Drive Bender. Other than being left with a handful of empty folders to deal with, restoring my original file structure hasn't been too difficult.