For the longest time I have allowed my backup to span multiple disks and I've controlled it using split level.  Some of my images are getting large now though and so I have restricted my backups user share to a single disk in the array which I know will always have enough space for the files.

 

My question is, since I already have a folder structure in place on other disks for this share, what will happen if split level is set to keep certain folders on the same disk, yet I have excluded those disks now from the backups user share?  Do I need to adjust split level to a higher value to avoid any potential issues?

It should honour the disk exclusivity, an easy way to test is to write a file to one of your existing folders and see what disk it ends up on.

 

Sent from a phone, sorry for any typos

 

 

Ok I just wrote a file to the user share and it did not show up on the disk that I specified in the "Included Disk(s)" field.  It got copied to the drive that already had the folder on it!

Just did another test and set the split level to 99 on the backups user share and copied the file again.  This time the file did get placed onto the new disk that I specified for that share.

 

So, it appears that if you already have an existing folder and split level structure in place, then restricting that share to a different disk after the fact has no effect?  i.e split level seems to trump disk restrictions!

 

Can anyone confirm that this behavior is by design?

The split level only controls the creation of the directories. If it finds the file's directory existing on a drive as it scans from drive 1 to drive xx, it'll use it regardless of exclusions.

As noted, the split level only applies to new folders -- if a folder already exists, and you write to it, it will go in the same location.    Note this also applies to included and/or excluded disks -- if you remove a disk from the list of included disks for a share, that only keeps that disk from being used for any further writes to the share.  All of the files in ANY disk that has the appropriate root-level folder (= the share name) will be included when listing and accessing the files in the share.

 

Understood... and makes sense.  Thanks for the clarification!