Virtual Drive

[Mohammed Faerber]

That was the development status as of January 2019. Meanwhile it made significant progress. An entire drive no longer needs to be virtualized. The goal of having all files visible without the need of physically downloading them is the same. Just more optimized.

The android client meanwhile does a lot of what we want - it can upload all new files (photos) but do not delete them when deleted on the phone. It is proving extremely cumbersome to recreate this on the desktop.

That's strange. Are you sure it is this exact KB number? Were you able to create virtual drives on the other PC after uninstalling this KB? If you didn't try it please do it to verify that KB4462933 is the problem.

I have two 64 bit W10 version 1803 PCs. Alcohol 52% on one and 120% on the other. I installed KB4462933 on both, rebooted and neither machine had their virtual drives. I attempt to add a virtual drive on both, the message appears that it is applying the virtual drive settings, but no virtual drives are added. Going back to the virtual drives settings screen shows the number of virtual drives as 0. I have confirmed by uninstalling this KB that functionality is restored.

Robbo, an administrator of Alcohol Soft forum, replied that it is a known issue. That's all I know myself. If there is something more or different to be found about this problem, that is the job of Alcohol's Development Team.

Specially created an account here to say that after upgrading from 1803 to 1809 (with installed both mentioned here cumulative updates ealier) virtual drive started to work back again after manual adding from app interface...

Please be aware that this cannot be treated as universal 100% solution... for me it worked... but before upgrade I made a full backup of my OS using my favorite backup software Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Professional SP5

I can confirm. The virtual machine boot issue causes a KB4467702 cumulative update in Windows 10 x64. Personally tested. When I update the uninstalled virtual drives work. After you reinstall that update no longer. Tested on Windows 10 Pro x64.

I'd just like to chime in and say I'm also having this issue. I'm on Windows 10 and tried uninstalling Alcohol, restarting, uninstalling SPTD, restarting, deleting sptd2.sys and the sptd registry key and uninstalling the Alcohol DVD driver in Device Manager I noticed it left behind, restarting, installing SPTD, restarting, and then installing Alcohol. No dice - when I select the number of virtual drives to 2, and I have This PC open, I can briefly see it create a drive, then it disappears as soon as "settings are applied," and the number of drives resets to zero. I am on the latest Alcohol version (2.0.3) and latest SPTD (Windows 10, 2.12 x64.) I also checked I don't have an UpperFilters/LowerFilters key for my DVD driver and I do not.

Thanks for all the information and please wait for the next version of Alcohol. Until then you can uninstall the two mentioned updates that cause trouble (KBKB4462933 and KB4467702) or try with Windows 10 1809.

It would be good if Dropbox had a feature where your space could be used as a virtual drive. So, as opposed to files and folders that you create (eg using Word or Explorer) and place on your Dropbox being created as local copies initially, and then you having to mark them as On Line Only for smart sync to remove them from your HDD and add them to your Dropbox, instead these files just automatically go to your online space.

I realise that if you create files and folders using the desktop app that this will happen automatically anyway, but I don;t want to use the app as I find it clumsy - I just want to create and edit files on a normal daily basis but have everything stored online.

There are many long time discussions in this forum about the best way accessing data resides in Dropbox account. The focuses are different. Starting from ability to sync data from different places outside Dropbox folder (even on different drives) to convenient way to keep engaged local storage as compact as possible. Using current Dropbox application implementation leads to "conflicting" situations, requiring sophisticated tricks for workarounds, sometimes. Provided features like "Selective sync" or "Smart sync" aren't always solutions. "Selective sync" ensure local space freeing, but makes unselected folders inaccessible. "Smart sync" keeps data accessibility, but still engage local space when a piece of data have to be accessed. Let's imagine, we should select one from thousands of movie/clip files for something. They are GBs of size every one. We need access to see how starts every one, probably few hundreds of kB up to few MB for every clip, enough to recall what's there. That what Dropbox application does, actually, is downloads entire file (every one) to gives access to just a small piece (the one needed). Is this some example of efficiency?! I don't think so. Many other examples on different types of data could be set. Another example is a user needs to add a file to Dropbox to share a result, for example, using Dropbox context menu. Most users don't expect a second copy to reside locally. How many are forum threads and support tickets related to this? A lot!

Possible solution: Introducing new type of access to account data using virtual block device. Such a solution doesn't engage any local storage (if we ignore a caching - which could be relatively small and optimized space, object of user preferencies) while keeps access to everything inside account. Files, used often (according user preferences, again), could be kept in sync locally (in a similar way like now). Additional preferences for every one folder, in sync locally, where to resides on. Something like current "Selective sync" preferences view, but with path attribute next to every one selected tree entry (not literally same, of course). All supported platforms support virtual block devices to some extend (Linux and Mac fully, Windows partially - missing ability to represent exactly as a folder) - enough for this proposal.

Such move have ability to solve many troubles reported like noted before. Current application organization could be kept available, of course, and every user could select what best match particular needs (i.e. the proposal could be an option).

I have three 10TB hard drives labeled as D:, F:, and G: respectively. Each of them has some free space available at the end of the drive. There are no OSes installed on any of the drives and keeping the data that is on the drives must be kept intact. I cannot format or lose the data on these drives. I unfortunately have no way of backing up this data at the time of writing, but that's a separate issue.

What I would like to do, if possible, is combine the available space from all 3 drives into one "virtual" drive with it's own drive letter (i.e. drive J: with a total of 269.2GB) without having to format the disks. I'd like to keep the data as-is and only work with the free space at the end of the drives.

Defrag is essential since it reports the last sector occupied by data to your Disk Management console, making it possible to shrink the volume up to a certain amount. You can safely defrag right away since, on modern Windows Server OSes, it usually works exceptionally quickly and takes 5 minutes at most, even on huge volumes. Unfortunately, sometimes a pagefile can be located at the end of the disk, making it impossible to move while defragging. As a result, a considerably small amount of shrinkable space is reported to the OS. If that is the case, you will need to reboot the virtual machine, temporarily disabling pagefile, perform the shrink and restore pagefile settings.

Indeed, deduplication is another excellent piece of advice that may save you a considerable amount of space. It does an amazingly great job on regular office files, similar virtual machines, and even Exchange and SQL databases. In order to estimate your potential storage savings without actually enabling deduplication, you can use a small free tool called Deduplication Analyzer Deduplication Analysis Solution from StarWind . Make sure to schedule the deduplication job out of working hours like weekends or nighly since it will significantly impact your performance when running.

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