Maintain & grow storage

Once a storage space exists, you maintain and grow it from the space’s menu on the Storage page. This covers keeping data intact, recovering from a drive failure, and adding capacity.

Scrubbing

A scrub reads back everything in a storage space and verifies it against the checksums Bitsmith keeps, catching silent corruption (bit rot) before it spreads. On a protected space, a scrub also repairs anything it finds using the redundant copy.

To run one now, open a space’s menu and choose Scrub now; the status shows progress, estimated time remaining, and any errors found. To schedule it, choose Update scrub schedule and pick Off, Weekly, or Monthly. Monthly is a sensible default for most homes, and Bitsmith shows the next and last run.

A finished scrub reports “Clean” or, if it found problems, the count of errors. Errors on a single-drive space can’t be repaired (there’s no second copy), which is why protected layouts matter for data you can’t lose.

Repair after a drive fails

If a drive in a protected space dies, the space keeps working but shows Degraded, meaning it’s running without its full protection. Your files are still readable, but a second failure could lose data, so repair it soon.

1. Replace the failed drive (or attach a new one).
2. Open the space’s menu and choose Repair. Bitsmith shows a dry-run preview of the repair, so you can see what will happen before committing to it.
3. Confirm to start the repair. Bitsmith rebuilds the missing data onto the new drive (a resilver) and shows progress. When it finishes, the space returns to Healthy.

The unhealthy drive is listed so you know which one to swap. A single-drive space has no protection to rebuild from; recover it from a backup instead.

Add capacity

Choose Extend storage and pick how to grow the space:

• Attach mirror, add an identical drive to a single-drive or mirror space so it gains (or keeps) one-drive protection.
• Add drives, add a new group of drives to a RAIDZ space for more room.
• Replace drive, swap a failing or smaller drive for a new one.
• Expand RAIDZ, grow a RAIDZ space live by adding a single drive to it, without rebuilding the pool or taking it offline.

Bitsmith shows which drives are eligible and the resulting capacity before you confirm.

Adopt existing storage

If you’ve moved drives from another server or a previous install, Bitsmith detects the pool and offers to adopt it. Choose Import storage (or Adopt existing storage during setup), review the detected pool, and confirm.

Your files stay where they are. Bitsmith starts managing the pool alongside its own storage, no reformatting and no copying.

Move data between spaces

To consolidate drives or retire an old space, use Migrate data to copy a drive’s data into another storage space. Bitsmith copies the files and reports progress; nothing is deleted from the source until you choose to wipe it.