Somehow, over time, I've ended up with files scattered across all sorts of drives.

 

A small sample:

 

Is there a simple way of getting these cleaned up so each directory resides on only one drive instead of 2, 3, or 4?

 

I know that I can use MC to go to /mnt/diskX/Movies/<movie name> then copy them to one disk, but that's incredibly time consuming to navigate through all those disks. Using MC, I tried going to /mnt/user/Movies/<movie name> then moving the entire directory structure to /mnt/cache/Movies/<movie name> with the idea that it would easily move the files to cache, then, when the mover runs neatly place them all on one disk. Unfortunately, this seems to leave me with empty directory structures on all those disks.

 

Actually, this doesn't seem to do a darn thing! MC takes time & shows files moving, but doesn't seem to actually move them. I have to move into each movie directory and move all the files by hand at each directory level.

 

Actually, I'm not sure what the heck this does - I just managed to delete a movie because deleting it from /mnt/user/Movies also deleted it from /mnt/cache/Movies. Which makes complete sense and I understand that, I just forgot what I was doing...

 

Note that I don't particularly care which disk a movie ends up on, I just would like to have it on one disk instead of four!

Edited October 24, 20178 yr by FreeMan

There is a plug-in called unbalance that has a gather option recently added. I think this might do what you want.
 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Edited October 24, 20178 yr by BillClinton

You can use this:

 

 

Thanks, guys! I had a nice response typed up and through I'd submitted it, but I guess not.

 

I'd tried unBalance about a year ago (according to the log dates), and was having (currently unspecified) issues with it. I've given it a fresh shot and it seems to be working. jbrodriguez is taking a quick look at a small issue, but I'm not having the major pains I did last time around, so all is good.

Just so you know and anyone else who reads this thread will know for future reference.

 

What you tried to do in your first post, moving from /mnt/user/Movies to /mnt/cache/Movies, is exactly the sort of thing your are NOT supposed to do. This can cause you to lose data to the User Share Copy Bug. You must only move or copy from disk to disk or user share to user share. Never mix disks and user shares when moving/copying. And /mnt/cache is a disk just like /mnt/disk1 is a disk.

16 minutes ago, trurl said:

This can cause you to lose data to the User Share Copy Bug.

 

Which is exactly what happened to me. Fortunately, it was just a movie that was easily replaceable. That's also why I immediately stopped and asked the question.

 

Thanks for the reminder, @trurl