Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[tunetyme]

I have an Icy Dock removable drive that I have been using to back up my music files.  I have bought some addition drives to store my video collection.  I am considering adding another Icy Dock drive. This would be the H drive.
Is there a method to identify which removable drive movies are located on without seeing all the * bursts indicating the files are missing.  What would happen if I reversed the G and H Drives?  I guess I am looking for a means to identify movies that I want to see then load up the appropriate drive without the missing file indication in either the G or H dock.

Tunetyme

[glynor]

I use a ThermalTake BlacX drive dock, and much the same setup.  Generally the way I run my system is like this:

1. My "main" RAID 5 "media" drive is connected to the server down in my basement "man-cave".  This contains all of my music, and most of my "active" video collection (the stuff I haven't watched yet, or am actively watching).

2. I have a set of SATA drives (3 1.5TB "green" drives currently) that I use for "archival media".  One of these is used for archived movies (and is around 70% full), the other two are used for archived TV Shows (one is completely full, the other is new and mostly empty).\

3. Each drive mounts as X: (external).  You can do this manually, but I use a cool little application called USBDLM, which allows you to create a config file that you put on the disk itself that will assign the proper drive letter as soon as you plug it into a computer running USBDLM.  The downside to this approach is that you can't mount two separate archive drives simultaneously, but this need never comes up (I can only watch one thing at a time, and since they're all archive things, I don't need to use them very often).

4. Each external drive has it's own MC Library, ON THE DISK ITSELF.  This library is always in the same place on the drive, X:\library_data\.  I have ONE "library" in my MC installs called "external disk" which points to this location.  I simply plug in the drive, and then switch MC to the External Drive library, and it uses the library files on the disk itself.

It works quite well.  The only downside is that you need to remember manually what content lives where.  I've solved that mostly by simply upgrading my archive drives to large disks, so I keep their total number very low (1 movies disk, and 2 TV show disks right now).  Once upon a time I had one master MC library, and used external media for archived content... That was "challenging" and I would sometimes end up losing the data for the archived media if I messed up the Auto-Import settings (I strongly recommend you use the "No" setting for Fix Broken Media).

You can pull it off this way:

1. Make a new Library Field to contain the Archive Disk Name.  Label the disks themselves, and use a rational naming scheme (I called mine simply Archive01-TV or Archive03-Mov).

2. Any library item you move to an archive disk, set Removable=1 so that MC looks at the files as located on Removable media.  You can also use this field to filter your views, so that these "external" files only show in views where you want to see them.  I filtered them out of all my "main" views, and then had sub-views called "All Media" that were duplicates of the parent view except that they didn't filter External media.

3. Make sure the visible columns include the Archive Disk Name field you made, so that you know which disk to plug in when you want to watch something on an external disk.

4. Make a nice storage system for your drives.  WIC actually sells nice foam packing for shipping multiple hard drives for cheap, as part of the Seagate warranty program.  I bough one of these to store my drives, and it works well.  I measured and found a good RubberMaid container that fits the foam insert perfectly.

[glynor]

By the way, I'm constantly considering switching back to the "second style" of system listed.  It is just a little clunky, but it does nicely let you track that external content all in one place, which is super-convenient.  I'd still always mount the drives as "X:" because I'd really have limited need to mount more than one drive at a time.  I don't know if it does this now (maybe it does), but if not...

It would be REALLY nice if MC ignored, for the purposes of "Fix Broken Links", any files where [Removable]=1.

If I go with the "unified library" system, I like to have X: in my auto-import path, because that will grab any files that get moved there by another system or in some other manner that the Library I'm using doesn't see (and if I do this using a different copy of MC and make sure the JRSidecar.xml file is there, I'll always get the right metadata too).  The problem is that I also like to use Fix Broken Links set to Yes (Protect Network), but this doesn't work well with removable hard drives that have the same drive letter and folder naming scheme.  I like to use the Fix Broken Links setting because I also import my TV Recordings.  Most of these I delete when I'm done watching them (or let SageTV delete by itself when needed), and I want MC to automatically remove these missing files from my library, if any.

The problem comes only when using these special drives that I consider "removable" like a gigantic floppy disk.   I always want to "load" this disk into my "drive bay" and have it called X:, but... When I have two different "TV Show" archive drives, both of which have a valid X:\video\TV Shows\ path, but which contain different files underneath that path I run into file "Fix Broken Links" problems.  No matter which one of those drives I'm using, if I plug one in and MC is set to Fix Broken Links, it will happily remove the contents of the other drive from my library.  So, I have to choose between having a bunch of broken links in my MC library from my "tivo" drive, or being able to use a single unified library to track my external media.

Another option is to use different drive letters for each archive disk.  This can get confusing quickly though, and I mount all sorts of external drives to my computers, for bringing work home, storing system images, utility disks, special "clean" boot environments, and all sorts of things.  Keeping track of which one was supposed to be Q and which one was F and so on (and making sure not to exceed 22 or so total disks) would be a huge pain.  I only have one "bay" attached to each computer, so it makes sense to treat it like a floppy drive and call them all "X:".

One last alternative is to not use any drive letters at all, and mount them to a path in your main media location (you no longer have to use drive letters for hard drives in Windows).  This can get tricky when sharing the library over a network though, and getting set up everywhere when you use multiple machines would quickly get tedious.

[rjm]

I have suggested in the past that it would be wonderful if we could edit the removable tag. (Might also have to edit the volume tag.) This would make it easy to move media between online and offline (I think you call this external). Right now it is a major pain because the media must be re-imported and all the tags re-applied.

[glynor]

Damnit.  I just realized we couldn't, when I decided to switch back to this method!

We used to be able to edit it, it just didn't do much!

PS. Of course, "online" and "offline" is the proper terminology.  I was having trouble explaining myself.  I call the drives "X" because mnemonically it conjures the word "external", so that's how I tend to think about them.

[glynor]

This is very frustrating.  The [Removable] tag needs to be user editable, and the Auto-Import "Fix Broken Links" routine should ignore files where [Removable]=true.  I've recreated the Removable tag with a user-created [Offline] field, but I can't get it to show up in the Search Wizard as a usable option (so I have to hack it in using a Custom rule or Import/Export), and of course, the Auto-Import system doesn't know about it.

[glynor]

So, after consideration, I think I'm going to do a hybrid approach.  I'd really like the [Removable] issues mentioned above to be addressed, and then this would be a perfect setup.  So, starting today, my setup will be as follows:

Drive Layout:


Drive Name          |Drive Letter          |Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
media               |M:                    |primary media and user data store (RAID-5 volume)
portablemedia       |P:                    |primary media backup disk
tivo                |T:                    |TV recording drive
users               |U:                    |users data disk
arch01-tv           |X:                    |offline video storage disk #1 (tv show content)
arch02-mov          |X:                    |offline video storage disk #2 (movies)
arch03-tv           |X:                    |offline video storage disk #3 (tv show content)


Auto-Import Status:

Auto-Import will monitor essentially all of the locations on M and T.  Fix Broken Links is set to Yes (Protect Network Files).

P isn't monitored at all, but contains a full duplicate of all of the content on M, except for the User's Data directory.  This includes the M:\library_data\ folder where my main MC library lives.  This allows the P drive to be connected (via a USB drive case or dock) to my laptop or to other external computers and be mounted as drive M and used just as if the RAID was actually there.

U isn't really used in MC, it is just my "users" drive, though the data on it is backed up onto M at regular intervals by SyncBack SE, if anyone cares.

X isn't monitored by Auto-Import.  To get this media into MC, I need to manually scan it using a one-time import.  Hopefully, this will keep the "Fix Broken Links" setting from removing these files when X:\video\ is a valid directory, but doesn't contain some files.  If this doesn't work, then I'll be a sad man.

Archived (Offline) Files:
Each "X" drive (offline) will have a X:\library_data\ folder containing a MC Library listing ONLY the contents of that drive.  It will be created using a "clone" of my main library, but with irrelevant views deleted.  This can be easily accessed by switching the active library in MC to the one labeled "External Disk".  Since they all use the X drive letter, and have the library in the same place, then I don't need a listing for each of these libraries in MC's library manager, just the one "external drive" listing.

All offline content will be imported into my Master MC library, but will be filtered from the main views that I use everyday.  These files will all be tagged with [Offline]=1 (which I'd prefer to switch to [Removable] if possible in the future), and my views where I want to filter out the offline data include a [Offline]=0 rule.  Each of the views where I've filtered out the offline files will have a sub-view where this rule doesn't exist, and where I can browse my entire collection, regardless of "offline status".  This was easy to set up by simply drag-dropping the views onto themselves, choosing "copy", and then modifying the sub-view to delete that [Offline]=0 rule.  The process was slightly different for Theater View, instead I set up a "folder" called Archive, and put my "includes offline storage" views in there.  (See below for screenshots.)

All offline files will also be tagged with [Archive Drive]=drive name (taken from the list above).  My custom [Archive Drive] field is limited to only those three drive names as valid choices in the field setup.

Example Screenshots:

Setup for my standard TV Shows View in my main library:

Click to enlarge.

Setup for my "All TV Shows" sub-view:

Click to enlarge.

Theater View Setup showing the All TV Archive View:

Click to enlarge.

If the two issues I mentioned above can be fixed (ability to set [Removable] status for files and maybe, if necessary, having Fix Broken Links ignore [Removable]=1 files), then I'll be able to monitor X with Auto-Import as well, which would be convenient.

[tunetyme]

I am using a JBOD configuration with 1TB Samsung 103SJ.  They are very quiet and run cool.  I have 6 drives.  One (F:) is internal. I use this as my primary Music drive and have one as a backup and I have a second backup that I store off site.  I plan to use the same setup for video.  My internal Icy Dock is drive G: where I store my video.  I am planning to add a second Icy Dock only this will be external using eSATA interface to make it easier to make copies and provide portability for both music and video.  I am not using a server at this time. 

What I have envisioned is to number my drives and store that info in MC.  If there is a particular video I want to watch then I can identify the drive number (eliminates the drive letter issue) and insert it into the G: drive.  The challenge is the MC library ( I turn off the fix broken links feature) identifying all the removable media as a broken link.

Glynor, I like the idea of being able to edit the Removable field so MC would not attempt to fix the broken links. Is this feasible?

Tunetyme   

[tunetyme]

Bump

Jim is this something under consideration for future development?