I have a similar issue, but yet still different to the thread: "External Harddisk recognized by DMS but not by Library" so I've started a new thread. Hope that's ok.
I'm actually going to bring up 3 basic concerns overall, which are somewhat related.
1) Drive recognition location changing: I have 2 external USB drives attached via a USB hub (which allows up to 4 devices to be connected). This has worked for a while, but then suddenly everything duplicated in the library. The duplication also resets some of the custom info I've done which takes more than 2 hours to adjust for my current database size. What seems to cause this is if the drives start up in a different order (although physically the connection to the hub never changed). The DMS seems to issue it a different path numerically depending on startup timing of the drives. Note I've actually left these drives connected to the hub and therefore they stay connected physically the same so physically they have not changed. Therefore the issue seems to originate based on a spin up start issue as the drives come alive. The duplicate issues then cause problems as there is no easy way to remove duplicates (except one by one which takes hours) or rebuild the system (which will loose all the customizations made).
More specific info: the DMS assigns: /mnt/sdb/usbB1 to one drive and /mnt/sdb/usbB2 to the other. After a few reboots or startups, the drives numbers usbB1 moved to usbB2 and vice versa. This reaction would then cause a rebuild which would then double all the entries.
Any solutions? For instance - can the drives be named such that it will always recognize it and always assign it the same path regardless of startup or which of the four ports are used?
Possible solution: It may be nice to add a display preference switch that allows non-found paths/files to not display in the library (for other reasons some may want this to always display)? This way it would always show regardless of which path it starts up on without displaying duplicates?
2) Keeping name/info customizations to the library: On a related note, when it rebuilds the library, even when the previous one exists and it only changes from usbB1 to usbB2 it doesn't take your previous changes that you incorporate into the nfo file, this is quite a user unfriendly issue as well as some corrected mismatches. Note that I adjust a lot of my names for various reasons such as
"The Santa Clause" becomes "Santa Clause, The". (this is just a generic example, but it is noted that many of these do automatically get recognized with the ", The" or ", A" at the end but I have about 15 so far in 400 movies that don't)
There are also many other reasons I do renaming in the library such as adding a preface to movies that are not chronologically named but I want to present in the best order to view for us and group together in the lists (i.e. Divergent series). However to redo all these each rebuild, despite what you change the nfo file to correct for this, seems unfriendly to the user. Currently this takes me about 2 hours, and I've only pulled in about 15% of my movie collection so far. I anticipate this problem only becoming much more problematic as the size of the database increases.
3) Move file locations: If I want to move a number of my files to another location, I've copied them by doing through another computer, but also tried through the DMS interface itself (which is more time consuming). Both methods seem to cause duplicate entries. Is there any easy way to locate a large group of files to another drive without dealing with odd duplication issues? Note if the display preference issue above was one possibility, then this may solve this problem too. Note I am currently building my collection on USB drives, but then wanted to move to a networks solution later (when $ allow me to do so), so moving of much of the collection at some point (either by copy mechanisms, or installing the USB HD into an appropriate Network Drive if the drives will allow for this) would be expected. Additionally looking forward, with the duplication issues above for the path changes - would this mean that having DHCP addresses would be a bad thing and that the network drives should have a static address instead.
Any help / ideas for the above would be appreciated.
TRJ
I'm actually going to bring up 3 basic concerns overall, which are somewhat related.
1) Drive recognition location changing: I have 2 external USB drives attached via a USB hub (which allows up to 4 devices to be connected). This has worked for a while, but then suddenly everything duplicated in the library. The duplication also resets some of the custom info I've done which takes more than 2 hours to adjust for my current database size. What seems to cause this is if the drives start up in a different order (although physically the connection to the hub never changed). The DMS seems to issue it a different path numerically depending on startup timing of the drives. Note I've actually left these drives connected to the hub and therefore they stay connected physically the same so physically they have not changed. Therefore the issue seems to originate based on a spin up start issue as the drives come alive. The duplicate issues then cause problems as there is no easy way to remove duplicates (except one by one which takes hours) or rebuild the system (which will loose all the customizations made).
More specific info: the DMS assigns: /mnt/sdb/usbB1 to one drive and /mnt/sdb/usbB2 to the other. After a few reboots or startups, the drives numbers usbB1 moved to usbB2 and vice versa. This reaction would then cause a rebuild which would then double all the entries.
Any solutions? For instance - can the drives be named such that it will always recognize it and always assign it the same path regardless of startup or which of the four ports are used?
Possible solution: It may be nice to add a display preference switch that allows non-found paths/files to not display in the library (for other reasons some may want this to always display)? This way it would always show regardless of which path it starts up on without displaying duplicates?
2) Keeping name/info customizations to the library: On a related note, when it rebuilds the library, even when the previous one exists and it only changes from usbB1 to usbB2 it doesn't take your previous changes that you incorporate into the nfo file, this is quite a user unfriendly issue as well as some corrected mismatches. Note that I adjust a lot of my names for various reasons such as
"The Santa Clause" becomes "Santa Clause, The". (this is just a generic example, but it is noted that many of these do automatically get recognized with the ", The" or ", A" at the end but I have about 15 so far in 400 movies that don't)
There are also many other reasons I do renaming in the library such as adding a preface to movies that are not chronologically named but I want to present in the best order to view for us and group together in the lists (i.e. Divergent series). However to redo all these each rebuild, despite what you change the nfo file to correct for this, seems unfriendly to the user. Currently this takes me about 2 hours, and I've only pulled in about 15% of my movie collection so far. I anticipate this problem only becoming much more problematic as the size of the database increases.
3) Move file locations: If I want to move a number of my files to another location, I've copied them by doing through another computer, but also tried through the DMS interface itself (which is more time consuming). Both methods seem to cause duplicate entries. Is there any easy way to locate a large group of files to another drive without dealing with odd duplication issues? Note if the display preference issue above was one possibility, then this may solve this problem too. Note I am currently building my collection on USB drives, but then wanted to move to a networks solution later (when $ allow me to do so), so moving of much of the collection at some point (either by copy mechanisms, or installing the USB HD into an appropriate Network Drive if the drives will allow for this) would be expected. Additionally looking forward, with the duplication issues above for the path changes - would this mean that having DHCP addresses would be a bad thing and that the network drives should have a static address instead.
Any help / ideas for the above would be appreciated.
TRJ
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