Spread Zips across multiple drives/partitions - possible?

Support
1

I looked through the forums and manual but couldn’t tell if this was possible: when using Duplicati for a local backup, can I have the zips span across multiple drives and partitions in order to maximize space? For example, if I’m having Duplicati backup to a 2TB local drive Z: but also have 750gigs of free space on local drive K:, is there a way to tell Duplicati to use of that space once it runs out of space on Z: so my available backup space would be 2.75TB instead of 2TB?

Thanks.

2

Hi @mobamoba, welcome to the forum!

Duplicati is designed to work with a “dumb” destination, so there is no built in way to use space across multiple drives.

There might be some third party “usage balancing” tools out there but other than that or using a smart destination (I know unRAID can spread a share over multiple drives based on free space) there’s not much else you can do.

3

Understood. I really wasn’t thinking of it in terms of drive pooling but more like “Use drive Z until it runs out of space then use Drive K” or something. This would allow me to add more drives to my backup or use existing free space without requiring pooling.

4

I suppose it’s doable code wise, and if written correctly could be used to spread across multiple clouds as well, but there would need to be a pretty big update to a lot parts like:

  • parameters (how to pass multiple destinations & quotas)
  • how jobs definitions are stored (to support multiple destinations & quotas)
  • database (to know which files are store at which destinations)
  • error messages (to help point users to correct destination it a priority is found)
  • destination error handling (if one part of a destination set is not available should it be assumed permanently gone or just temporarily off line)

So my guess is that it such a feature were to be implemented, it would likely be quite a while before it showed up. :frowning:

Of course, Duplicati IS open source so you’re free to work at adding these types of features yourself (or getting others to work on it for you)… :wink:

5

Got it thanks. After starting this thread, I remembered I’d purchased a license for a program called Drive Bender years ago which is a pooling solution that does exactly what I requested - and is a much simpler solution than what you proposed! :slight_smile:

6

Heh - that’s actually one of of the “third party tools” I had in mind.

I’ve flagged your post as the “Solution”, but please come back and let us know how it works for you as this might be something others are interested in. Especially since you can add NAS/network drives to a pool which might help resolve some of the issues some people have when trying to run Duplicati as a service AND back up to network shares. :slight_smile:

7

So far it’s working great. Drive Bender can convert a currently used drive to a pooled drive without affecting the data and then you can add more drives or partitions to the pool. As long as they’re mapped, Drive Bender can find them. I set it up to use all of one drive before using the next though you can set it up to balance the data across multiple drives or however you like. It can also duplicate everything across multiple drives and partitioning which mimics the effect of RAID’s mirroring.

The real advantage to me of Drive Bender over something like Window’s built-in Storage Spaces or other RAID-like solutions is that Drive Bender changes the way Windows sees the drives/partitions but doesn’t affect anything underneath. In other words, it’s completely OS independent and doesn’t require the program to read or reassemble the files, i.e. you can take any drive and plug it into any computer that can read NTFS and all the Duplicati zip files will be sitting there in a hidden folder.

1 Like