Video Archive - considerations for restructuring HDD-setup

[nia]

Hi.

I'm in the process of merging my many separate drives into a 6*400GB RAID5 "single" drive.

As my recordings so far has been distributed on 6 different drives, and even organised in subfolders (for my sons cartoons etc.) VideoArchive has been an essential add-on (for other reasons as well).

I have now copied the contents of 4 of these disks (the 4 400GB in production) elsewhere, an I'm just about ready to make the new RAID 5 volume.

Question: What is the best way to approach this in relation to VA, as these files (and there's a lot!) will reoccur in a new location (but in the same structure). Should I go for the Beta with the new database?

I'm slightly worried as I have previously experienced orphans when reorganising files. This has mostly been when putting recordings into sub-folders or deleting them from the file-system using Explorer.

Also, should I disable VA plugin while copying back (it takes a looong time to copy 1,5TB!). Thus avoiding the machine being unresponsive/crashing from trying to fix VA-entries as well as recieving files over USB, FireWire and Ethernet at the same time?

So in short: Merging D: E: G: and H: into D: (still keeping my 160GB F:, that will propably become E, what is the best way to proceed?

Jeff?

TIA for any advice

Niels

[Jeff]

I've moved hundreds of megabytes of files from disk to disk and its worked fine. You should be able to either move them while GBPVR is running or move them off line and then use the rescan function (F11 or the GO key) to rescan the disks and find the new locations. The location information is stored in a different table than the detailed information about the file so you shouldn't loose anything from moving them.

As to moving to the new DB, the biggest issue is probably going to be that the new plug-in automatically launches ffmpeg to create posters for movies and TV show directories if you don't already have one. That can kill performance if you need lots of them. If you can wait a while to move things you could wait until I update the test version to throttle this behavior. If you can't wait I would upgrade using the old plug-in for now.

Jeff

[nia]

Thanks Jeff.

I'll continue on the old VA-platform while I migrate. Then new RAID home for the files will perform considerably faster than any single disk, so that will be a better place to be although I suspect that is only an insignificant contribution to the poster-process.

/N

[Jeff]

I've changed the test version and posted a new version that only runs one instance of ffmpeg at a time, which should solve the potential performance problem. See http://forums.gbpvr.com/showpost.php?p=1...tcount=103 for a description of its features. At this point I think it is safe (and wise) to move to the test version. I am making a few more small feature additions and will then probably release this as the new version in a week or so.

Jeff

[Jeff]

The version still says 3.1 (I never both to bump that). The dll file should be from April 2007. You need to be sure to download the "test" version rather than the "released" version.

Jeff