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[gregvinci]

I have three copies of my library (~6TB). MC is currently organizing just one of them. The other two are simply original copies of my library BEFORE I imported it into MC. In organizing things with MC, I deleted a lot of duplicates albums and tracks. MC Backups are done almost daily. If something were to happen to the MC-organized HD, what would MC do if I simply pointed it at one of the other drives? Would I have to go back and delete those extra albums and tracks?

[wer]

If you have auto-import enabled to run in the background, with Fix Broken Links=YES, the results could be unfortunate.

In that case, and the drive fails, MC will go looking for the files, and if it can't find them, it will delete them from your library.  There is an additional option, Fix Broken Links=Yes (protect files on missing drives that is supposed to protect against that.)

I recommend using Fix Broken Links=NO.  This setting means MC will never delete anything from your library unless you explicitly tell it to.

So if your drive has failed, and MC has not automatically deleted all the tracks from your library, you have two options:

1. Put the files back where MC expects to find them, either by mounting a new drive and copying the files over from the backup, or mounting the backup drive (if it has the same directory structure) using the failed drive's letter.  MC will then see the files, and all will be well.

2. Use the Rename Move & Copy Files tool to update the database to point to the new location for the files.  It is the work of a few seconds to, for example, change all occurrences of D:\FLAC\ to E:\BACKUP\FLAC.  The files will not be moved or touched, MC will just update its internal database with their new location.  Again all will be well.

In both cases, since the backup files probably have not been touched for some time, the tags might be out of sync with the metadata in the library.  In that case, you would need to do an "Update Tags from Library" on all the affected files, to write the current tag values stored in the library back to the files (assuming you want your files to be correct).  That could take a while, if there are thousands.

I hope this helps...

[gregvinci]

Wer,

Thanks so much! Exactly the answer I was looking for. I will copy and paste it into my technical notes.

[blgentry]

Hopefully you consider one of your copies to be the master copy.  Additionally, hopefully, the "master" copy is the MC copy.  If that's true, then you should overwrite the other copies with the master.  I'm guessing you are evaluating slowly to try to make sure that what you think is the best copy, really has everything that you want it to have and that you haven't somehow missed "important" files in the other copies.

Backups are only useful if they represent COPIES of the original.  Backups that are kinda like the original, but not really, but close, but not really close... they become a huge headache of their own.  Best to have a true point in time copy of the thing you are backing up.  I use an rsync script to back up my various libraries on demand.  I usually run it once every few weeks.  But that's just my approach.

Good luck.

Brian.