When I started using unraid, I didn't create any shares, and just copied the files into separate folders on to each drive manually as I started out with just 2 drives. Is there any easy way to start using shares now to sort out my files across multiple drives?

When I started using unraid, I didn't create any shares, and just copied the files into separate folders on to each drive manually as I started out with just 2 drives. Is there any easy way to start using shares now to sort out my files across multiple drives?

If you turn on User shares then every top level folder on each drive becomes a share with the name of the folder.  If the same top level folder exists on more than one drive then they are both treated as being part of the same share.

 

Therefore you should arrange the folder structure on each drive so that the only folders at the top level correspond to the shares you want to use and then turn on User shares under Settings->Global Share settings.

I did the same originally just using the disk directly with folders for each movie on each drive. When I converted to using shares (required for using Plex docker), BEFORE I turned shares on, I went into each drive and created a top level folder named "Movies". Then I moved all the existing folders (using MC) for each title into that top level Movies folder on each respective drive. Then when I turned on shares, it automatically picked up "Movies" as a share across all drives that had that top level folder.

 

Otherwise all your folders will be converted to shares... way too many lol.