I've had my Unraid server up and running for a few months and overall i'm 110% with my purchase.  I've currently backed up about 550 of my movies and just noticed my split levels are off because my TS files are spanning multiple disk and Id like to setup it up so a Movie is always contained on a single disk.

 

All my movies are backed up via TS folders.  I have a share called Movies using Split Level 2 and Most Free allocation method.  It's obvious now these weren't the right settings to keep entire folders structures created under the movies share on single disks.  I've read the post about this topic, but don't want to make another 500 Movie mistake and decided to jsut ask about the best settings.  So first question...What split level settings and allocations methods should I be using?  I don't know if it matters, but I have 9 Drives in this array from 320GB - 640GB

 

I'd like the folder structure to be something like this:

 

DISK 0

--Movies

----300

------Audio_TS

------Video_TS

----Rocky

------Audio_TS

------Video_TS

 

DISK 1

--Movies

----Batman Begins

------Audio_TS

------Video_TS

----Michael Clayton

------Audio_TS

------Video_TS

----Rocky V

------Audio_TS

------Video_TS

 

Second Question...how do I clean up this big mess I've made?  Is it possible to create a brand new share named DVD & Movies with the correct allocation methods, log into the unraid box via putty and move everything from one share to the other.  I was hoping while it moved the movies, it would move the files on the drives using he corrected allocation methods you tell me about from question 1.

At work this now but heres some quick tip.

 

The comamnd line tool mc can move and merge folders. use this rather than any other it will save you time.

 

Look for a tool on the wiki called undist.sh I wrote. It not very good but it does tell you what disks hold what data quickly.

 

Split level. Consider level 0 to be the server. One folder in is level 1. count the number of folders deep using this system and stop at one before the point where you want unRAID to be able to split (or put another way create folders itself to split the data)

Looks like level 1 to me. The Movies directory can be created on multiple disks but the sub-directories under Movies can not. In other works, using level 1 means your sub-directory "300" can not be split.

 

Peter

 

Hum...So in my example above, the Disk is level 0, the movies director is lvl 1,, the named moved folders are lvl 2 and the TS folders are lvl 3. 

 

So If I make the new Share folder with split lvl 1, then move the items into the new new share, it should recombined the items?  I guess I'm going to turn off the parity drive for now to else this is going to take forever...

Just a clarification, the User Shares never move files, or 'recombine' groups of them.  (The mover script is an external agent, that moves files from the Cache drive to the User Shares.)  The Split Level settings are used to determine where the *new* files are written, not the old.

ahhhh..okay (not entirely sure what you just said)

 

Are you saying if I move the from /mnt/user/Movies to my new Movie holder /mnt/user/MovieVault, the system won't recombine the folder structures?  If not, can you recommend a fast way to do this.  I really don't want to manually combine each folder at a time.

Actually, your action of copying files from one User Share to a new User Share with a different Split Level setting may act to recombine the folders, just the way you want them if set correctly.  I personally would copy, not move, then verify correct results, before deleting the originals.  You should be able to test this by trying some copies of files in folders split across disks.

Darn.....no Dice

 

I created the New "MovieVault" share with settings split level 1 and most free.  I then used MC to test copy 10 folders from the "Movie" Share to the new "MovieVault" share.  Each of the 10 folders was split across my 8th and 9th drives.

 

Sigh, anyone else have any ideas on how to get these folders rejoined?

Don't copy to a user share.  I would copy from the movies directory directly to a folder on a disk.  So from Movies copy to disk1/newmovies.  This way you know where the movies are being copied to.