I have looked around (see below) but haven't found exactly what I'm looking for:

 

I have been adding drives over time, not often, and as I have gained more and more understanding of the system and how things work, I realize I didn't do things according to best practices back in the beginning; this is especially true when it comes to user shares.

 

Now I would like to move things around to balance the drives better (and to make sure that all files associated with a movie or season are together on the same physical disc). I know how to use Midnight Commander (basic use only, could use a good primer on advanced use), and really basic CLI stuff.

 

My goals: to avoid unnecessary moves as much as possible, to keep parity squared up, and end up with user shares that match my intentions.

 

This is all part of one more round of upgrading too. Current array: 2TB parity, 3x1TB and 1x2TB data drives, 120GB SSD Cache. Upgraded Array: 3TB Parity, 1x3TB, 2X2TB, 3x1TB data drives, etc.

 

Once I double my space, I just want to have everything set up so that if I have catastrophic failure, I can figure out what's missing and rebuild.

 

Or, am I like the guy in the first post below, and just over-thinking and over-worrying?

 

Thanks to all that help.

 

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=28698.0 [Where the user wanted to move files after adding a drive because one was more full than he wanted, advice was why bother]

 

and

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=29227.0 [advice on rebalancing to put DVD files on same physical disk]

 

and

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3808.0 [where the advice was to move things to the desired physical disk and delete from the unwanted location]

 

and

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=21813.0 [which almost gets me there]

 

 

 

... to balance the drives better

 

There is NO reason to "balance the drives"  (except perhaps a psychological desire for it).

 

 

... to make sure that all files associated with a movie or season are together on the same physical disk

 

This (at least the first part -- keeping a movie's files together) is a good idea.    But in most cases you're not likely to have many instances where this isn't already the case, so all you need to do is move a few movies around a bit to resolve it.

 

 

My goals: to avoid unnecessary moves as much as possible, to keep parity squared up, and end up with user shares that match my intentions.

 

As I noted, you need very few movies.    As long as you don't start over ["New Config"], your parity will remain valid throughout the process.    As for the shares matching your intentions -- only you can decide that 

 

 

Once I double my space, I just want to have everything set up so that if I have catastrophic failure, I can figure out what's missing and rebuild.

 

Just keep a fairly current directory of everything on your array -- perhaps even by disk # -- and you can always tell what you need to restore if you lose multiple disks [Note that if you just lose one disk, you can simply replace it and UnRAID will rebuild it].    As for a catastrophic failure of 2 or more disks ... the simplest thing to do in that case is just restore from your backups.    Just use a synchronization utility for those copies so it skips everything that's already there, and copy all your backup disks to the array.

 

 

Or, am I like the guy in the first post below, and just over-thinking and over-worrying?

 

You're probably over-worrying about how things are allocated;  but it's good to think about how you'll handle catastrophic failures ... if you're well-prepared, you'll never lose anything.