How to enable stub delete monitoring

Starting with FileFly 3, you can configure advanced server features from your FileFly Admin Portal.

Stub deletion monitoring is an especially useful option that most sites enable. The feature tracks any delete events on stub files and adds them to the queue of files to be removed from the second tier of storage on the next scrub policy run.

This is useful for keeping secondary file systems up-to-date and avoiding unnecessary orphan files. Orphan files are files on the second tier of storage with no primary stub and no DrTool file to recover it. Although you can usually access these files directly via the secondary storage, it is often cumbersome and best avoided.

Enabling the monitoring

1. Upgrade to the latest version of FileFly and push the upgrade to all agents.

2. Reboot after the upgrade; FileFly 3 has a substantial improvement to the filter driver that enables the data migration on the file system.

3. On one of your servers that needs to have stub delete monitoring enabled, open the FileFly Admin Portal, open the Servers tab, and open that server.
   
   

   Open

   

4. In its Server Details, you see a screen with a summary of the Server Statistics. Click Configure to navigate to advanced options for that server.
   
   

   Open

   

5. Here you can configure log transport to a Syslog server:
   
   

6. Scroll down to Stub Deletion Monitoring. This panel is also where you configure demigration blocking (useful for antivirus exceptions) and parallelization tuning.
   
   

7. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Save.
   

8. You are instructed to restart the service and to verify your changes; click Yes.
   
   

9. After clicking Yes, the Servers listing reminds you to restart the agent service:
   
   

10. Restart the service to apply the changes.

Verifying the monitoring

1. Open the agent's configuration file to see what the changes look like. Default location:
   C:\Program Files (x86)\Caringo FileFly\data\FileFly Agent\ff_agent.cfg

2. The configuration shows the monitored volumes:
   
   

3. Stop the service to verify the feature is enabled.

4. Open the messages log, which is here by default: 
   C:\Program Files (x86)\Caringo FileFly\logs\FileFly Agent\messages.log

5. Scroll to the bottom of the log file to see the last state shutdown.

6. Before the server init lines, you should see StubDeleteMonitoring.MonitoredVolumes as you configured it: