Moving media to another drive

[dawkid 5]

Hi. New here.

I couldn't find anything specific on the forum that would help me so I am asking the question.

What is the best/proper way to move movies TV shows etc. to a new folder/drive.

 

This is what I have done so far.

I have two hard drives for media. One is almost full and I wanted to move some of the media from it to the new one to free up space.

I moved one movie from the movies folder on the first drive to the movies folder on the second drive.

That didn't go well. It no longer showed up in the library.

I had to move it out of the new location, re-scan, move it back re-scan and that brought it back although it named it "The making of". I was able to rename it using the edit info and now it seems OK.

 

Second try.

I wanted to move an entire TV series.

1. I copied the TV series directory structure to a temp folder.

2. I used the Delete media item in the media browser to delete the entire series. ( Hopefully this would allow emby to keep track of what is going on.)

3. Did a re-scan. TV series was gone.

4. Deleted all the meta files including the .nfo files from all the folders in the TV series structure.

5. Copied the structure to the TV Shows directory on the new drive.

6. Did a re-scan. The series showed up in the media browser.

GOOD.

 

So it looks like Second try works well.

Anybody have tips to make this process easier?

Am I doing any unnecessary steps?

Anything else that I am missing?

 

Thanks for any input.

 

[Guest asrequested]

Have you tried adding your new drive to your library, use the same folder structure, run library scan, then move the files from one drive to the other?

[Guest asrequested]

You should use drivepooling. It would make it much easier.

Edited October 7, 2017 by Doofus

[dawkid 5]

Thanks,

 I haven't tried drive pooling.

I just installed emby for the first time yesterday and both the old and new drives were added to the library at initial set up.

Works flawlessly.

[Guest asrequested]

Drive Bender

 

Stablebit Drivepool

[dawkid 5]

You should use drivepooling. It would make it much easier.

I will keep this in mind when I set up a dedicated server.

Would it really make it that much easier on my set up now. I just have it set up on my PC with two usb drives hooked up.

Seems like overkill.

If it would make it a lot easier on my current set up please explain. Emby seems to do a nice job of merging the media on both drives in to one interface.

[Guest asrequested]

I will keep this in mind when I set up a dedicated server.

Would it really make it that much easier on my set up now. I just have it set up on my PC with two usb drives hooked up.

Seems like overkill.

If it would make it a lot easier on my current set up please explain. Emby seems to do a nice job of merging the media on both drives in to one interface.

 

Oh, you're using external hard drives. As you only have two, and you are ok with manually balancing them, you'll be fine. With drivepooling, all your drives are read as one. So you just add your media and the software does the rest. And later, if you fill those drives, you can just add another drive to the pool and again the software will balance everything, for you.

[dawkid 5]

Thanks.

Eventually I will be moving to a dedicated server with internal drives.

I had one set up for a while but my wife decided it was too noisy so I moved everything to my PC. (quiet)

I think I am going to build a server closet out in the garage.

Current backup plan is prayer and original DVD and Blu-ray disks.

 

[Deathsquirrel 745]

Sounds like we have similar base setups.  How many discs do you have to rip?

 

I initially started with an old pc and whatever spare drives I had laying around, adding more as I filled them.  As I did folder-based collections that meant moving things to new drives fairly often.  Within that basic structure the best thing to do is make sure you're saving metadata with the media and then when you move things the metadata moves with it and after your next library scan you'll see that movie at the new location and it won't be treated as new media.