Losing a disk in Greyhole?

[reezin14]

I haven't had this happen but I was wondering if I was to lose 1 of my 4 disk drives in greyhole would I still be able to access the other copies stored on the other disk? And does greyhole rebuild a newly added disk on it's own,or is it built back up just like adding a new drive to greyholes drive pool? TIA

[lrevxl]

If the drive dies, Greyhole will see that one of your drives is missing and it will schedule an fsck. If you have >1 file copies for the share it will 1. create missing file copies from one of your other drives and 2. point the symlink to one of the still present file copies. If you only keep 1 copy of files for a share and you lose a drive in the pool, the files for that share on the drive are gone. (In this case I'd hope you had some sort of backup!)

Greyhole doesn't 'rebuild' disks. It isn't like raid in that sense. What will happen is if you add a new drive to the pool you can run a 'greyhole --balance' and Greyhole will do it's best to move files around so that all your pool drives, including the new one, have a mostly even amount of free space. Otherwise for a while, presumably, the new drive will be the most empty of your pool drives and all new files will be written to it as Greyhole's balanced drive choosing algorithm will consistently choose it until it's got less free space than your other pool drives.