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Author Topic: Moving music files to an external drive without losing their history?  (Read 1915 times)

slefty

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My music files have been spread between two drives, one USB drive and the internal HD in the music server PC. I recently upgraded to a better, larger capacity USB drive. Moving the folder from the old USB drive was no problem, since I assigned the new drive the same drive letter as the old one after removing the old drive. didn't have to do anything else.

However, when I move the folder with all the files that are on the C drive to the USB drive, I need to make sure I don't lose the history (last played date, number of plays, audio analysis, etc). Last time I swapped drives three years ago I lost all that info.

Any way to move just the music files to a new drive without losing info?
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slefty

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Re: Moving music files to an external drive without losing their history?
« Reply #1 on: January 11, 2017, 11:47:57 am »

Never mind, using the Library tool for "Rename, Move and Copy" it is handling this perfectly now. Just using it to find and replace the part of the path leading up to the library folder.
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fitbrit

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Re: Moving music files to an external drive without losing their history?
« Reply #2 on: January 11, 2017, 01:05:51 pm »

Good job figuring it out. That is one of MC's most awesome tools. Did you do the "move" in "update" mode?
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slefty

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Re: Moving music files to an external drive without losing their history?
« Reply #3 on: January 11, 2017, 02:24:59 pm »

Went under Tools/library Tools/Move, rename and copy, and under "Find and replace" used this:
 
Find: C:\Users\Steve server\Music\

Replace with: d:\

worked perfectly.
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fitbrit

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Re: Moving music files to an external drive without losing their history?
« Reply #4 on: January 11, 2017, 02:40:59 pm »

At the top left is a drop-down menu with different "modes". The default one will actually move the files for you, moving them from C to D. The "update" mode is useful when you've already moved them in Windows and you just want MC to change its reference location for the files from C to D, to let it know you've made that change elsewhere.
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slefty

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Re: Moving music files to an external drive without losing their history?
« Reply #5 on: January 11, 2017, 04:11:08 pm »

Thanks, good to know that difference. I always worry when moving files, so I made a separate copy of the files first, verified they were good, then created the new location as described above, and after verifying it was good, deleted the extra copy. Extra work, but at least I was comfortable in knowing I didn't lose anything.
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fitbrit

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Re: Moving music files to an external drive without losing their history?
« Reply #6 on: January 11, 2017, 04:27:01 pm »

It's good to be cautious, but you want to be careful that you don't cause MC to overwrite existing files (easy to miss, even with 2 prompts!), or create duplicates in the new location, so the update feature would have been perfect to use here.
Anyway, good work!
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