Review: Drive Bender for Windows Home Server 2011 – Part 5 Importing Your WHS v1 Data

by Paul Carvajal on November 16, 2011 · 38 comments

in Reviews

First, I want to say “Thank you” to those that have left comments about this series of reviews.  Please keep them coming.  While I haven’t directly responded to each one, I’ve been reviewing them for any suggestions you’ve had and tried to incorporate them into the review.

I tore down my HP EX495 a couple of weeks ago, which had about 12 TB of storage space that I was using as a “backup system” for my Windows Home Server 2011 system.  In the middle of writing the review of Drive Bender, I got the bright idea to see if I could import my WHS v1 into WHS 2011 using Drive Bender. Fortunately, I hadn’t needed to re-deploy my hard drives in my EX495 and just left the data on it.  After a little thought, and an error or two on my part, I was able to import all of my files and access them, and I’ll share my experience with you here.

Disclaimer: 

  1. As mentioned in my bio, I’m a Tech Enthusiast, NOT an IT guy.  So what I’m writing about is based upon my personal experience in doing this.  Use this information at your own risk.  Those of you who are IT professionals, please chime in and fill in any gaps or pitfalls in the comments section.
  2. I have NOT tested this extensively, however, at this point, I have not found any files I cannot access.
  3. I have NOT found anyone else who can collaborate my findings, so this has been only been on my WHS 2011.
  4. I have NOT done this exactly as I’m writing this, due to a few changes in Drive Bender’s latest release, I already had WHS 2011 up and running, plus I’m changing a few things based upon my learnings.
  5. Again, Drive Bender does NOT erase your data, so your data should be accessible.

As with performing any structure change with your data – make sure you have a current backup of all of your data, especially any data that can’t be reproduced, such as family photos, videos, financial files, etc!

I suggest reading the entire article thoroughly BEFORE you begin.  Use it at your own risk.

Also, this process can only be done if you’re using Drive Bender!

Preparation for your WHS v1 system

Before you begin, you need to prepare your WHS v1 for this import.

  1. Your Client Backups made with WHS v1 will not be usable with WHS 2011 and will not import over.  You will want to think this over before starting this process.
  2. Turn off duplication on your WHS v1.  This will remove the “duplicated” files from your WHS v1 and we don’t want to import these into WHS 2011.  Drive Bender will make it’s own “duplicated” files.  This process may take a long time and you may need to reboot to remove them entirely.
  3. If WHS Duplication was your only backup, you’ll need to make a decision on how to proceed.  Again, I highly recommend you create a backup of any data that is critical to you.
  4. If you’re NOT going to use all of your hard drives from WHS v1, you will need to remove those drives now from your WHS v1 system using the “Remove Drive” function in WHS v1.  Depending upon the amount of data on the drive being removed, this could take less than an hour for a small or near empty drive, to many hours (overnight or longer) for a 2TB drive that is near capacity.
  5. You need to finalize any changes to your Shared Folders in WHS v1.  I would make sure your data is EXACTLY the way you want to import it in WHS 2011.  Write down the EXACT spellings of your Shared Folders.
  6. Turn off the Guest account, users, etc. so that NO ONE has access to any of the Shared Folders. I would also suggest deleting any Users in WHS v1.  BE CAREFUL – if users have created files under their user account folders, you should be asked whether or not you want to retain the folder.  The reason these for these steps is that we want to minimize the possibilities of any “permissions” from your WHS v1  being imported into your WHS 2011.  I’ll discuss this in further detail later in the review.
  7. If you haven’t already, you will need to move all of your data off of your Operating System drive in WHS v1. There is a program called “Drive Balancer” that can assist with this. You can learn more about that in this forum topic.  Remember, WHS v1 STORES DATA ON THE OS DRIVE!  You can copy this data over later if you choose, but it can be kind of cumbersome.  I would suggest doing it now.
  8. Check your backups one more time to be sure that everything is there and working correctly.
  9. Power down your WHS v1 system and say “goodbye”!

Preparation for your WHS 2011 system

  1. Install WHS 2011 onto your new operating system drive.
  2. Reboot.
  3. Once you’ve rebooted, open your WHS Dashboard.  You should see under the “Server Folders and Hard Drive” Add-In, the mandatory Server Folders, Documents, Music, Pictures, Recorded TV, and Videos pointed to your D:/ drive.
  4. Install Drive Bender.
  5. Reboot – DO NOT DO ANYTHING ELSE AFTER YOU INSTALL DRIVE BENDER – VERY IMPORTANT!
  6. Once you reboot, open your Dashboard – this will create the Drive Bender Pool Instance or Drive Pool.
  7. Wait a couple of minutes for the pool to be built.
  8. Shutdown your system. Again, DO NOT DO ANYTHING ELSE AFTER YOU OPEN YOUR DASHBOARD – VERY IMPORTANT! DO NOT CREATE USERS, SIGN IN TO YOUR HOMEGROUP, ETC.
  9. Install your data drive(s) from you WHS v1 system into your WHS 2011.
  10. Start your system.
  11. Once you start your system, you’re at your day of reckoning – to proceed or not to proceed.  If you proceed with the steps below, your data will still be there, HOWEVER YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO RESTORE YOUR DRIVES BACK TO WHS v1!  Again, the data will be there and you can copy it to another hard drive, but you will not be able to use the Server Recovery feature in WHS v1.

Manipulating your WHS v1 Data to use with WHS 2011

  1. You will need to remote into your WHS 2011 server.
  2. Open “Windows Explorer” and verify that all of the drives you have added have “drive letters” associated with the drives.  This should have happened automatically.  If not, you’ll need to assign a “drive letter” to each drive.  If you are manually assigning drive letters to the drives, I would recommend rebooting when you’re finished.
  3. Once this is done, we need to manipulate the directory structure of the drives to make it easy to import.
  4. Start with a drive, I started with drive E:/, which will look like this below and create a folder to copy the data to – I created E:/WHS Data (it’s not shown in the picture).
  5. Now enter the directory E:/DE/Shares – you will see all of your “Shared Folders” from your WHS v.1 system.
  6. Go to Edit>Select All> and then Edit>Move to Folder and move ALL of the Shared Folders to the “WHS DATA” directory.
  7. I then deleted the “DE” folder (be sure the “shares” folder is empty) and “Recycler” folders as these were specific to WHS v1.
  8. So now your drive should look like this:
  9. At this point, I wanted to make sure that none of the folder permissions are carried over from WHS v1.  So I right clicked on the folder I created in the root directory (WHS Data) and selected “Properties”, which brought the pop up box below.
  10. Check the two boxes as shown above and click “OK”.

This will then copy all of the permission in the main folder to all of the folders in the directory and should erase any permissions from WHS v1.

Now your drive is ready to use with Drive Bender.

Note: You will need to do the above for every WHS v1 data drive you import into Drive Bender.  I would recommend you do this to all drives before proceeding to add drives to your pool.

Converting and Merging Drives

Your drive pool is already created and again, what’s good about a “pool” without any drives?  We now need to get your drives and data in to the pool.

We’re going to “Convert” the first drive and all other drives will “Merge” into the pool.  This will give you one drive letter for all of your “Server Folders”.  Also, DO NOT USE YOUR DRIVE D: FOLDERS NOR SHOULD YOU USE THE DRIVE LETTER D: FOR THESE FOLDERS!!!  I’ll explain why in the next article on “File Duplication”.

The first drive is the ONLY DRIVE where we’ll use the “Convert” function.  To make this easier, we’ll use the new “Pool Setup Wizard” feature.

  1. Go to the “Drive Bender” add in on your WHS Dashboard and select the “Pool Setup Wizard”.
  2. Choose the “Convert” option below (2nd choice)
  3. “Convert” your drive
  4. When you’re finished, Reboot your system.

Merging Drives

  1. Make sure you moved all of your data into your new directory on each drive BEFORE you “Merge” your drive.
  2. Select the “Server Folders and Hard Drive” Add-In and click on the “Pool Management” tab.
  3. Highlight the drive you wish to “Merge” into your pool under “Single Drives” and on the top left under “Tasks” select “Merge a Drive”.  The “Merge” option does not appear unless you’ve highlighted a drive under “Single Drives”.
  4. Go throught the “Merge” function and select “Root Folder” for the path.  Make sure the new directory you moved your data to is in the “Root Folder”.  If you followed the steps in “Manipulating Your Data” you’ll be fine.

Once it finishes, reboot.  Then proceed with the rest of your drives.  Again, I would reboot after each drive that you “merge”.

I did have Drive Bender pop up once or twice with an error.  It really wasn’t an error.  I found this occurred with drives with large amounts of data and if it took more that 30 seconds or so to merge.  If you open up the option “Running transactions and tasks”, it showed it continuing to merge.  Again, I haven’t found any data issues.

Create Your Shared or Server Folders

Before you start, I suggest you “Shutdown” your server.  Let it set for a few minutes and then restart it.

  1. Remote into your WHS 2011
  2. Open your WHS Dashboard
  3. Click on the “Server Folders and Hard Drive Add-In”
  4. Create your Server or Shared Folders as needed.
  5. Once you’re finished, install the “Connector” software on any other computer and create users, as you see fit.

Permissions

Other than a few errors that I created, such as “merging” a hard drive into the wrong pool, etc. the conversion I did went pretty smoothly.

However, the one issue I had was with folder permissions.  Great to have the data on the pool, bad not to be able to access it!

For whatever reason, I couldn’t access my data via the Dashboard when I finished.  I did a little troubleshooting and ultimately this is what I believe solved the problem.

If you can’t access your data by clicking on the folder in the Add-In “Server Folders and Hard Drives”, then try the following:

  1. Reboot – I know you did this 8 times if you have 8 hard drives, but try it again.  This time do a “Safe Boot” by hitting the <F8> key as soon as the computer starts.
  2. Once you boot up in “Safe Boot”, reboot the server.
  3. Once it reboots, let the server sit for 5 or 10 minutes.
  4. Open the Dashboard and try to access a “Server Folder” again in the “Server Folders” Add-In.
  5. If that didn’t work, then click on “Pool Management”.
  6. Click on “Pool Maintenance and Repair”.
  7. On the dialog box the comes up, choose the “Repair one or more pool configurations”.
  8. Let it finish.
  9. Wait a few minutes.
  10. Shutdown the system and let it sit for a few minutes.
  11. Restart the system.
  12. This should have solved your problem.

When I did this, it solved a few other issues I was having with the folder permissions and moving some folders as well.  This may be problem with the fact I have a RAID card in my system, but I was having a few problems like this before I started this conversion as well.  In addition, I couldn’t figure out exactly what the feature / issue was, but in a future release of Drive Bender, v1.3, there is some functionality coming to assist with the “Server or Shared Folders” in WHS 2011.

Summary

All in all, I was pretty satisfied with the result.  Again, I caused a couple of the issues I had and a couple were just trying to figure out what the process should be.

Drive Bender recommends that you turn on File Duplication when you import, merge, copy data, etc. to the pool.  I did NOT do this as I didn’t have enough space in my pool to do this.

I would have liked to have tried the entire process again now that I’ve accomplished this, however, I have no way to go back and ensure that this is a repeatable process.

Next up, Part 6 – File Duplication.  This next article will be in  3 or 4 days as my data is continuing to duplicate and I’m using their highest level of safety feature. I’m going to reformat operating system and see if I can rebuild the pool from scratch as well as seeing how it handles a hard drive failure. Stay tuned!

This is part of a multi-part review of the Drive Bender software for Windows Home Server 2011.
Part 1: Introduction to Drive Bender
Part 2: Terminology and Installation
Part 3: Adding Drives With Data to your Pool
Part 4: Managing Your Pool Instance
Part 5: Importing your WHS v1 Data

Article by

I guess you could say I'm Home Tech Enthusiast. I'm a little different than most of the people who probably visit the website. I'm not an IT person! I love technology and want to find cool things that have a purpose. I'm not one who likes to program, create things, etc., I like to spend my time using them. Plus, my wife is NOT technology oriented! The more complicated things are, the more my life is complicated! One thing I hate about electronics nowadays, is that all documentation is written as though you know this, you've already been to another site or section to find this, etc. Nothing is clear cut. So, I try to write everything to the lowest denominator. Keep it basic, keep it simple, and make it fun!


{ 38 comments }

John Zajdler November 16, 2011 at 9:07 am

In the 1st section called “Preparation for your WHS v1 system”, I would suggest to backup your data using the builtin WHS backup solution. Once you free up space by turning off Duplication and using the option to “Remove Drive”, then use some of these drives to add them back through the Console as non pooled backup drives. Then through the Computers and Backup Tab, you will see your server listed. Choose this to backup your shares to the non pooled backup drives with the help of the pulldown menu. Try to maximize the storage space on the drives that you added as backup drives because you will need hard drives in your new WHS2011 server. When your done, power down your server and physically remove the drives and put them aside. Power up your server without the drives, don’t worry about them not being in the server.

John Zajdler November 16, 2011 at 9:25 am

What’s interesting here is that you should still have your WHSv1 OS drive and if you really messed up your WHS2011/Drive Bender, you can go back to using WHSv1 by adding blank drives to v1 as pooled drives, then use the backup drives to bring your data back.

I think a flow chart would explain this method, :-)

Paul Carvajal November 16, 2011 at 9:41 am

Thanks John for your input. Certainly another way to go back to WHS v1.

Paul Carvajal November 16, 2011 at 9:43 am

Sorry hit the enter key too fast.

Certainly another way to back up your data in case you need to go back to WHS v1.

jericko November 16, 2011 at 10:39 am

Let me ask this, if I have DB installed and they come out with a new version, is it easy to upgrade?

Hawk January 19, 2012 at 3:08 pm

Good to see real expertise on display. Your cotnruitbion is most welcome.

Paul Carvajal November 16, 2011 at 11:13 am

It’s easy – just download and install.

By the way, did I mention, REBOOT! :-)

sm November 22, 2011 at 12:50 am

thanks, this is going to be my turkey day weekend project. Great Job!

Paul Carvajal November 23, 2011 at 11:05 am

Great – let us know how it goes.

sm November 23, 2011 at 11:34 am

We’ll i got started a little early and finished WAY earlier than i expected with only a few hiccups. I believe i skipped a step of merging the data on one of the pooled drives and not ALL of my video data was transferred. Luckily i had back ups to cover my mistake. had i done the steps per your instructions, i would have been fine. needless to say all is working great. THANK YOU for this.! Great Job!

Paul Carvajal November 24, 2011 at 2:10 pm

That’s awesome – glad to hear it. Let me know if you have any other issues.

barcode generator November 25, 2011 at 4:50 am

That is really useful. I like it and thank you for sharing precious knowledge to us.

John L. November 25, 2011 at 7:16 pm

I would have done it differently. Right now, I use Microsoft’s sync toy. I have all my data duplicated and ready to go on another server. The downside is that it will take probably take 24 hours to copy TBs of data. Time to me is not important as the pictures and videos that I have are priceless. Granted, it is expensive to have 2 servers, however, sync toy can be ran on a PC to move from WHS V1 to 2011. I understand that one will have to have disk drives in the new system. However, that is typical of an IT guy, high cost in hardware to reduce the risk to the data.

Paul Carvajal November 26, 2011 at 8:18 pm

Thanks John for your comments.

This type of scenario is for those that would be using their current WHS v.1 to upgrade to WHS 2011.

There are many ways to transfer your data, SyncToy, RichCopy, etc. if you have two systems and enough hard drives. The best I’ve been able to transfer is about 3.5TB a day using these tools. I was able to convert about 7.5 TB of data using this process in a hour. You should not lose your data doing this process.

However, I agree you should always have EXTRA BACKUPS OR COPIES OF ANY DATA THAT CAN’T BE RECREATED!. I personally use Carbonite for this type of data

Jon December 12, 2011 at 10:57 am

How does Drive bender do at streaming ? Does it have any of the performance issues that WHSv1 has with Demigrator on ?

Paul Carvajal December 12, 2011 at 4:39 pm

Jon,

I haven’t had any streaming issues. I have been watching my BluRay’s as much as I can and I don’t see any difference than I did from my RAID Array.

With that said, I am currently running a Video Converter 24×7 to convert all of my movies to an mpeg-4. This maxes my processor out at 100%. I was having an issue with the drive going “off-line” requiring a reboot every couple of days. I’m not sure if it’s because of the Video Converter or DB. I have installed the latest version of DB, 1.2.2.0 and a new version of my Video Converter software and this seems to have fixed the problem.

All in all, once most of the bugs were fixed, it has performed as well or better as DE did for WHS v.1. As a matter of fact, I purchased a 2nd license for a Windows 7 unit I’m using to backup my data. I’m a “backup freak” and I wanted a 3rd copy (original data, duplicated data, and a copy) of my movies. I also add an online backup for my most critical data.

Jon December 14, 2011 at 5:53 am

Thanks for the feedback .. One thing im worried about after doing some research is Drive bender doesn’t work with NFS ? Having you been streaming blu rays with SMB ? That worries me because i never had any luck with Blu rays folders via SMB on WHS1

Paul Carvajal December 14, 2011 at 9:24 am

I’ve not had any issues with BluRays or anything else. I have shared folders for them on a 100meg network and everything plays fine on 3 different clients. I use MyMovies & TMT3. As a matter of fact, I have a 2nd computer, Windows 7 computer, with DB on it and I’m currently copying from my WHS 2011 to it’s shared folders as a backup for my data. Works fine.

Jon December 17, 2011 at 6:13 pm

I Just set up my New HP Micro Sever from Black Friday deal … Added 8 GB of RAM .. Added a Nvidia 8400GS PCIe card to offload HD Streaming and a WD Duel USB 3.0 PCIe Card (spent 2 1/2 hrs trying to figure out why it could see my Primary harddrive .. Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB Hybrid drive in a Icydock 3.5″ to 2.5″ drive converter) Turns out i forgot the SATA mobo connection when i put the Mobo back in DOH ! damn Jack Daniels …

Anyhow i am really liking WHS 2011 right now .. nothing to fancy just busted a part a couple 2 TB external WD drives i had and reformatted them in the Microserver .. Streaming Blu Rays works great to my PCH A-300 ..

Long Story short i am really really considering transforming my 20TB EX495 over to WHS2011 with Drivebender … right on the edge of the fence

Jon December 24, 2011 at 2:40 pm

Your Guide Worked Perfect ! Thanks .. I Dint even think i followed it exactly as i was Wrapping Gifts and drinking scotch and i have had No issues … Well my EX495 no longer sees one of my hard drives ill have to try to figure that out later oh and i had to manually install a new Driver so it could use the E-Sata port for my other 4 Hard drives via Esata

Dan January 3, 2012 at 2:02 pm

Paul, great guide, and very informative. so how is eveyone coming along with drive bender? I have a black friday Micro sever thats been sitting on my desk for over month, and can’t decided how to go, 2tb internal raid 1 , and then Jbod, windows raid 1 and Jbod, or drive bender with duplication. Figure, if I can get the this resolved, I’ll move on the the next two issues, AV and server share backups, I think I’ll miss the server share backup utility more than the DE, espeically since there is a replacment for DE, haven’t seen a 3rd party backup software that works with in the dashboard.

Paul Carvajal January 4, 2012 at 10:19 am

I’ve not heard of any issues with DB at this point, the only comments I’ve had have been positive. I currently am running two machines with DB, WHS 2011 and Windows 7, and have had little to no issues with it. As a matter of fact, WHS 2011 with DB, I’ve had fewer issues than I had with WHS v.1.

With that said, DB does not have all of features released yet, which should be any day. This was originally to have been launched in early December and they’re running a little late. Once this final version is launched, I’ll be writing the final article of “Duplication” for DB.

It’s unfortunate that the backup feature was left out of WHS 2011. This was a great feature that is needed for the home user. However, there are alternatives to this that can do a good job. I’ll discuss some of these in a future article in January.

Thanks for comments and let me know if you need anything else.

Dan January 5, 2012 at 7:32 am

I think I’ll procrastinate a little longer, wait for your article on duplication, and maybe the next release of drive bender. my only reason for upgrading is I would like to house my ceton tuner card in the server, can’t do that with my media smart, and not to mention, that darn newegg black friday deal, how can you pass up the microserver for $250 with a free copy of WHS 2011 to boot.

keep up with the great articles.

Paul Carvajal January 11, 2012 at 9:50 am

Thanks for comments Dan.

It looks like the next release is still a ways away, so I’m planning on doing the duplication article shortly.

Thanks.

Jeff January 5, 2012 at 11:26 am

I thought I took the long way to migrate but based on your WHS v1 preparation steps my way of converting might have been easier.

I had 5 drives in WHS v1 but my case had room for more drives. Since WHS 2011 only needs a small OS drive 160GB and of that only uses 60GB for C, I used a 2.5″ WD Blue for OS. Then I purchased a 1TB Green as my new “D” drive. I shut down the WHS v1, removed WHS v1 OS drive installed 2.5″ WHS 2011 OS drive and new 1TB Green.

Installed WHS 2011, moved shared folders from extended partition on OS drive to 1TB drive and setup DB. DB had one pool and one drive in the pool, the 1TB which was now the D drive and had all the shared folders. I recreated all the users with the same user name and password as WHS v1 and created all “other” folders I had created from years of using WHS v1. I then proceeded to attach one WHS v1 drive at a time to the WHS 2011 server. I’d copy all the data in the “data” folder from the drive to the DB pool. Once all the data was copied off the drive I formatted it and added it to the pool. After the first WHS v1 drive was added to the pool I turned on file duplication of all relevant folders. After each drive’s data was completely copied to the DB pool and after I formatted the drive and added it to the pool, I’d shut down the server attached the next drive and repeat. Any duplicated data from WHS v1 was recognized as already existing on the DB pool, so I would replace the files to ensure I wasn’t missing anything. Finally, once all “data” drives were added I’d add the original WHS v1 drive to the WHS 2011 server. Copy over it’s data and add that final drive to the pool. Server complete! I’ve done the same process for two other WHS v1 to WHS 2011 conversions and it’s the safest I found because at no time was all my important data all on one single drive. To be extra careful, you can use the DB dashboard to ensure that the important files are duplicated to two separate drives before wiping data off the next drive. My only permissions issues seem to occur when I add my computers to the Home Group but that is probably a “me” issue rather then a technical issue as my understanding of how Home group’s work is limited. Keep my PCs out of a home group and no permissions issues. Just my $.02.

Paul Carvajal January 11, 2012 at 9:47 am

Jeff,

Thanks for sharing – glad to hear all went well. If you can, tell us how many drives you migrated and how long it took you?

Thanks.

Jeff January 17, 2012 at 10:51 am

There were 7 drives – 1x1TB – OS, 1x500MB, 2x1TB and 2 X 2TB and about 5.5GB used and about 2TB in duplicated files. It took about 7 hours or less although probably less then an hour of me actually “doing” something to move the data over but with ZERO risk of data loss unless I happened to break two drives during the process which I was fortunate didn’t occur.

Copy and paste with file duplication turn on within drive bender upfront worked best for me as the original drive always had the data on it until I confirmed it was copied onto the DB pool. Usually, I wasn’t standing over my computer during the process so once the copy finished DB started file duplication so I had the data on the original drive and all important data duplicated on two drives on DB pool, plus I still had the original file duplicated on another hard drive from DE WHSv1 so at specific points during the move I actually had important data on 4 separate drives rather then consolidating down to one drive and hoping the “merge” went successfully and risking something happening during DB file duplication, which as we know takes a while.

Paul Carvajal January 20, 2012 at 7:53 pm

Glad to hear everything worked out okay on your transfer.

Duplication got a rework in one of the releases and now it duplicates much faster than it did before. When I DID NOT have duplication enabled and copying files to the pool, it took almost 10 days for about 10TBs of data to duplicate after it was copied. Now it takes maybe a day or so.

Thanks for sharing your experience!

Jonathab Rosche February 1, 2012 at 10:15 pm

How is the duplication article coming along? I am waiting on it, as I currently setup drive bender switching from whs v1. I took the long route of taking out half my drives, copying my movies over, installing windows server 2012, and transferring the movies back. I have 13tb in the pool now working great, but I am worried a out adding my other 13tb because I fear drive bender might screw up and lose all my data. Right now I have them waiting as a backup outside my server. I am waiting for your tried approval before I risk it. It’s alot of data to lose. Should I be worried, or just add the drives and turn on duplication?

Paul Carvajal February 15, 2012 at 11:18 am

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you. I’ve been working with DB extensively over the last couple of months and I don’t feel that I’m where I need to be to write the article on duplication.

DB was to have launched an upgrade in December that was to add a few features that you would need to make it ready for the masses. As of today, this update is not available.

As far as going to 26TBs, I currently have 38TBs in my pool and I’ve been running this for almost for 4 months with no issues in regards to the pool size. I am having a few minor issues in regards to the pool staying available. Again, a minor annoyance.

In addition, I had a hard drive go bad and I was able to recover all of the lost data.

Hope this helps and letme know if you need anything else.

Dan February 15, 2012 at 12:45 pm

Yep, i’m waiting for version 1.3, from what I’ve read that’s the magic number that will let you move the pre-existing share folders to the drive pool, as a stand move folder function. Along with that, I’m just buying time to see how the earlier adapters are doing. My deadline to have the new server up and running is Nov, that’s when the AV on my MSS EX485 expires. Thanks for the update on drivebender, so far so good.

Dan February 19, 2012 at 8:26 am

Ok, I’ve finally just said heck with it, i’m moving to my new box, namely because I want to host my ceton card in the server. Question, My current whs decided it was time to go to sleep, while I was in the middle migrating some data, is there a program that can anazylsis, and then sync data between two directories? I know there’s sync toy, but I was hoping for something that looked at the digital signatures of each file, and not just the file name.

So far so good, I have only two drives in the pool, tranfer speeds are good, but if folder duplication is enabled, I’m seeing about a 20-40% reduction in speeds, still exceeding 30/mpbs, but I was getting 45-50/mpbs plus with folders with out duplication turned on.

Paul Carvajal February 19, 2012 at 7:47 pm

What I do when transferring a large amount of data across the network, is I use Microsoft Rich Tools to do the initial copy and then I use SyncToy to make sure everything transferred.

Hope this helps and let us know how it goes.

Sim Card Recovery February 22, 2012 at 5:38 am

Mobile Phone Sim Card Sms Recovery recovers all corrupted data from your mobile phone sim card retrieve read and unread inbox message outbox messages

dan March 20, 2012 at 9:15 pm

ok, for file transfers, I’ve found a really cool tool called free commander, does a bit for bit compare or CRC, transers are actually done using the windows copy funtion but the data verificaation sets the tool apart, and be patience.

I’ve also become a fan of stable bit, seems to integrate better than Drive bender, while I have no idea what the technical differences are, it just feels more like a part of whs, and less like and addin, sadly I’m unit to get my WHS 2011 up and running inproduction, but i’m very close, still evaluating atlternative backup options.

If your looking for an AV, check out comodo end point protection, I’m using the paid version, and it runs great, only time will tell who well it works, but at $19 for up to 15 clients, you can’t bet that.

Sam Roberts October 28, 2012 at 4:48 am

Hey,

Really interesting article. I think I’m moving from Unraid to WHS w/ DB. And you article has given me a bit more confidence.

What ever happened to article 6??? Will you be doing this anytime soon or is the project now dead?

Does WHS have all the disc spun up when accessing the pool or can you set it up so that only the drive with the data on is spinning? I’m a little concerned with power consumption.

Sam

Stuart January 17, 2013 at 5:36 am

Hi Paul

I have just setup a new HP Microserver N40L with the default 250GB Hard Drive, I installed WHS 2011 and it created the 60GB C:\ drive and the rest as D:\ drive where the ServerFolder shares are located.

I have an additional 3x 3TB Western Digital Red drives to go in to the Microserver. These are brand new and have no data on them. I have purchased a copy of Drive Bender but am now unsure what is the best approach?

I read on this link

http://files.division-m.com/drive_bender/online_help/converting_a_windows_drive_into_a_pooled_drive.htm?mw=MjQw&st=MQ==&sct=MA==&ms=AA==

Converting a Windows drive into a pooled drive:-

Tip – If you are using Drive Bender on an install of WHS, the drive conversion feature is a great way to turn the default drive D to a pooled drive.

Would you recommend converting the existing D:\ partition in to the Drive Bender pool ?

I am currently backing up the entire 250GB C:\ D:\ drive with Acronis True Image as if it goes wrong I needed a way to quickly restore the WHS 2011 install back to how it was before I started messing with Drive Bender.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

Regards

Stuart

aka CW-KID

Stuart January 17, 2013 at 5:56 am

Division-M recommend adding the default WHS 2011 D:\ partition in to the Drive Bender Pool here as well:

http://files.division-m.com/drive_bender/online_help/pool_setup_wizard.htm?mw=MjQw&q=d2hz&st=Mw==&sct=MA==&ms=AA==

“Convert an existing Windows drive to a Drive Bender pooled drive, while keeping the existing files intact.
This option takes and existing Windows hard drive, and convert this drive into a pooled drive. This means all information on the drive is retained, and the drive letter remains the same. For the most part there should be no perceivable difference in the drive. Additional drives can be added to the pool at a later time using the Add drive option.
This is the recommended method of pool creation when using Drive Bender with WHS 2011. By converting the default “D”, all the existing server folders and permissions are retained (including the “Client Computer Backups” folder).”

Is this what others have done?

Thanks

Comments are closed, visit the forums to continue the discussion.

Previous post:

Next post: