I have set up 2 disks, created pools and setting up shares.
– By default there’s 1.0 GB allocated for my 930.5 GB 1st drive. What is this for? can I use the entire 930.0 GB instead? My setup and usage is for home only for me and family members to access photos.
– I have 2 linux pc, a mac and windows devices who will be accessing this. Do I use only Samba or both samba and NFS.
– what’s the extra mount options in Pools menu? I’m using entrire disks and will transfer folders in there
@meazz1 Hello again.
Re:
Could you show a picture of where you are reading that from, I’m assuming it’s from the pool details page. Btrfs allocates in chunks and the usual chunk size is 1 GB:
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SysadminGuide
So I’m assuming what you are seeing is the first chunk required to hold the first few blocks of the filesystem you have created (the pool or btrfs volume).
If you only have on chunk allocated on one drive you may be using raid0 or single which gives no redundancy, and hence no ability to self repair. The recomended minimum btrfs raid level is raid1 as then there is at least 2 copies of each bit of data and metadata with each on a 2 different devices. The if one copy goes bad it can be repaired by the copy on the other device. A picture of you pool details page may help with this information.
These chunks will be allocated on an as-needed basis. So I’m assuming you are just seeing the very first block. Lets have a look at the details page to clear up what’s what here.
Mainly comes in with advanced custom use or in disaster recovery scenarios and if you are using a Stable Channel release or a fairly recent source build then there are mechanisms to advise you on how to use these mount points and in what order when that situation (a dead/missing drive) arises.
Hope that helps.
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Here are some screenshots.
Raid configuration: single is setup. Should I delete and do Raid 1? I’m not sure what “single” means.
Hi @meazz1,
“Single” means there is a single disk in the pool. You can’t have any kind of RAID without more than 1 disk.
That 1GB you see used without any actual data on it is the reserved chunks for metadata and is completely normal.
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@vesper1978 Re:
Sort of, especially in @meazz1 examples. It’s also the only btrfs ‘level’ that can be used with a pool that has only a single disk. But the ‘single’ btrfs level, I believe, means there is only a single copy of whatever this ‘level’ is used for. In Rockstor it would be for both the data and the metadata. So that means irrespective of how many drives you add to a ‘single’ pool there will only ever be a single copy of the data/metadata. Hence being the only level that can ‘handle’ a single device in the pool without being mounted degraded. So as you say, no redundancy as there is no second copy to reference if the first copy (and only in this level) is lost; say in a drive failure.
@meazz1 I’m not sure if you are aware but it is possible to have raid1 for example (2 copies of data/metadata) with devices of different sizes, such as you have. The pool itself will run out of usable space once all the space on the smaller drive has been allocated and used as then it will no longer be able to store 2 copies across 2 devices. But if one was to add another 1 GB drive to that pool then the remaining space on the 2 GB drive could be used by in unison with the second drive, there by ensuring 2 copies across 2 devices.
And then there is the question of how the single level compares to the raid0 level, I’ll leave that one hanging for now 
.
Although we do have the following in our docs Redundancy profiles but that is a little buggy when it comes to the raid5/6 and 10 (mostly correct) descriptions but the most common and generally recommended level is usually raid1 anyway.
Hope that helps.
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Thanks for the detail explanation.
What I’m thinking after this is to start over with Raid1 adding a 2nd 2 tb hdd instead the 1tb.
My initial plan was to manually backup stuff from the 1st disk to 2nd disk that way only make redundant copy of important stuff.
Here’s an update.
I setup my first RS with 2 single disks, Main and Backup, just to store and have photos available to my family members within my LAN.
Reason for single setup is I have 1TB and 2Tb disks on hand and did not want to lose the extra TB by a Raid1 setup.
So, my goal is to transfer all my photos to the Main share from my PC over the network connection and later manually duplicate photos to Backup share. After that any time I add photos to my Main share I would manually add them to Backup share, therefore keeping both Photo folder in sync, in theory.
So, I can utilize the extra 1TB for storage of less important stuff which needs no duplicate backup.
So, what is the best way to copy from share 1 to share 2 (disk 1 to disk 2)?
you could try rsync, especially if you’re essentially alway copy from the same source to the same target. For alternatives you can do a quick search for rsync like tools (e.g. synthing, for which even a RockOn exists, but that is likely overkill for what you want to do in a local environment setting).