Hello!

I've been having this issue for quite some time. From what it looks like, Mover is not pre-allocating space before moving files - thus bypassing the minimum freespace requirement on each share. Should I use unbalanced to fix this (again)? How do I prevent it from occuring in the future?

Probably your split level.

Attach Diagnostics ZIP to your NEXT post in this thread.

4 hours ago, ShadeXero said:

Mover is not pre-allocating space before moving files

Mover does not pre-allocate space - it just checks that the free space is not already below the minimum specified before deciding a drive dan be selected as the target. There must therefore be more Free Space than the size of the file to be moved or the move will fail. That is why the standard recommendation is to set the Minimum Free Space to at least the size of the file to be moved, and preferably a bit higher to give margin for error.

Diagnostics attached as requested.
defiant-diagnostics-20251213-0310.zip

My understanding was if the Share has 900GB minimum set free, it would not move files to a drive that has less than that.

I plan on using unbalanced (again) to move files around, but I'm unsure of how to prevent this from happening.

1 hour ago, ShadeXero said:

it would not move files to a drive that has less than that.

Note that split-level overrides all allocation method.

2 hours ago, ShadeXero said:

it would not move files to a drive that has less than that

That would be true unless you have a restrictive Split Level setting that forces files to a particular drive regardless of Allocation Method or Minimum Free Space settings.

6 hours ago, ShadeXero said:

I plan on using unbalanced (again) to move files around

Not to self-promote or anything, but the disk space management plugin will take care of moving things automatically for you, so you don't need to do it manually every time. It was created because I was moving things around on a daily basis, and now it does it for me automatically :)

5 hours ago, itimpi said:

That would be true unless you have a restrictive Split Level setting that forces files to a particular drive regardless of Allocation Method or Minimum Free Space settings.

Understood. So I should adjust my paramters to "move any folders as required" instead? This makes sense as it'll fill the share on a single disk until the high water limit, then split into another disk instead of forcing it to the disk it was created on (I'm assuming). Note: I did have all disks selected.

1 hour ago, strike said:

Not to self-promote or anything, but the disk space management plugin will take care of moving things automatically for you, so you don't need to do it manually every time. It was created because I was moving things around on a daily basis, and now it does it for me automatically :)

Looks great! I'll try it out today.

One suggestion, maybe have a dropdown for the existing shares instead of typing them in. Also, one for Anime (I used other for this). I'll enable turbo write manually before running this to speed things along.

Edited December 13, 2025Dec 13 by ShadeXero

18 minutes ago, ShadeXero said:

One suggestion, maybe have a dropdown for the existing shares instead of typing them in

It's a good suggestion, in theory, but I explained why I chose not to do this in this post: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/191758-plugin-disk-space-management-mainly-for-those-who-use-the-split-level-feature-in-unraid/page/2/#findComment-1595625

20 minutes ago, ShadeXero said:

Also, one for Anime (I used other for this).

You can use Movie or Tv Shows for this also, each library can have multiple comma-separated paths. So in the movies library, you can have Media/Movies,Media/Anime, for example. But you can use the other category too if you want. I suggest reading the help text by pressing the help button in the top right corner of the webui for info about each setting.