Will Droid effect my files

[Daniel Carroll]

Hi,

I am planning on using Droid to profile a large group of file shares within my organisation and am wondering is there any risk of Droid affecting the files?

Will Droid simply crawl the file shares and allow me to produce reports or will it 'do' anything to the files.

Apologies if this is a basic question!

Thanks,

Dan

[Dclipsham]

Hi Dan, no DROID should have no effect upon your files, it simply reads their innards and reports what it finds. If you are in any way concerned you may wish to set your collection to read-only, or maybe take a complete backup using something like teracopy or robocopy, but it's engineered to be non-intrusive.

David

[Matt Palmer]

I would recommend creating a user that only has read-only permissions to all the files you want to scan. 

This is not because DROID does anything other than read the files - it is engineered to only read the files it scans.  This is because it is common that there is no single user which *can* read all the files across a large shared drive, other than Administrator, and I don't recommend running any software as Admin. 

It also protects you if some unforeseen bug in DROID deletes or changes a file.  I should stress that this is not part of DROID's design, and no such bug has ever been found, but still, it's good to be safe when managing your information.

DROID itself requires write access to a temporary folder, as it processes those files, but it does not need write access to the files it scans.

Note: I don't work for the National Archives any more, but I did technically manage the DROID 5 and 6 projects.

Regards,

Matt

[Daniel Carroll]

Thanks Matt and David for your input. That is extremely useful. I will follow your recommendations!

I will be looking to scan approximately 12Tb of data. Would you recommend DROID for a task of this size, also to compile a comprehensive report?

Many thanks again for the replies!

Dan

[Matt Palmer]

Hi Dan,

we tested DROID over multi-terrabyte file stores when creating it, and it has been run over very large stores in several government departments.  So this is doable.

Running over such a large file store (depending on how big the files are vs. how many of them there are) can take days or weeks to process. 

It is prudent to periodically pause a job of this size and save the results, at least once a day.

Another way to partition the results is to scan each top level folder as a separate DROID profile.  You can report over multiple profiles, so this should be roughly equivalent to doing it all in one profile.

If the disk is on a server, you should also pay attention to times when the server needs to go down for scheduled maintenance.  Again - pause DROID, save the results so far, then resume when the server is back up.

You can always throttle DROID to process files slower if it's causing too much network traffic or server load, but this will, of course, increase the processing time quite substantially.  We never saw a large hit on the network or server load running DROID, so we didn't need this feature - but it's there if you need it.

Hope this helps; again not official National Archives advice, just my 0.2p.

Regards,

Matt

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