How to maintain metadata when moving data files

[waffull]

I need to move a couple TBs of movies/music from the HDs they are on over to other HDs and a NAS. Does anyone know how I can maintain the metadata that I've already entered in Mezzmo (genre, year, cover art, etc?) I've already had to redo all of that once when I went from the trial to paid version. I'm not looking forward to doing it again and possibly multiple times in the future as I need to move data around.

Thanks for the help,
Marc

[Paul]

Are you just changing the drive letter or the folder structure as well?

[waffull]

Drive letters definitely. The folder structure that contains the files will remain the same, but above that may change. IE: 'c:\users\%username%\videos\tv' becomes 'h:\videos\tv' and 'e:\movies' becomes 'h:\videos\movies'. But '..\tv\west wing\season x' remains the same.

[Paul]

The only way to do this is to manually change the database's records - if you're comfortable with that, I can tell you what program to download and what SQL commands to enter to achieve this.

[waffull]

Yes, I can do that. I've worked with sqlite and mysql a bit, so with your guidance I'm sure I can do that.
Thank you..

[Paul]

Ok, first step is to make a backup of your Mezzmo.db :) and of course stop the server, shut down Mezzmo.

Then download the sqlite3.exe command line tool from here: http://sqlite.org/download.html (the precompiled binary for Windows).

After that copy it to the same folder as Mezzmo.db and run:


sqlite3 mezzmo.db

this should give you a database prompt. There enter:


update mgofile set file=replace(file,"C:\Users\blah\Videos\","H:\Videos\") where file like "C:\Users\blah\Videos\%";

Please make sure that the second parameter in the replace() function is exactly as it's in the database, because this function is case-sensitive.

Let me know how that goes.

[waffull]

Worked like a charm, thank you. I used http://sqlitebrowser.sourceforge.net to see the exact paths which were already in the db in order to get the cases correct. After running the update command for all folders, I then opened Mezzmo and changed the folder locations for the folders I had added. Checked the metadata and it all appears to be there.

Thank you for your help.
Marc

[Paul]

Glad to help and hopefully this will help others as well.

[steppinwolf]

I successfully updated strings in mezzmo.MGOFile.file about a year ago, but now when I try the following query it returns "Error: column file is not unique":

update MGOFile set file = replace(file, 'D:\', 'F:\') where file like 'D:\%';

Tried double quotes, the mezzmo service is stopped and select * from mgofile where file like "D:\%"; confirms the existence of the string. All I need is to change the drive letter...

[Paul]

It needs double-quotes, but you tried that. Strange, it should work. Which database browser/editor are you using?

[steppinwolf]

Yes, I started off using double quotes then tried single. I used SQLite shell version 3.7.9 from SQLite.org and also tried sqlite admin 0.8.3.2...

Update: Whoops, I should have thought of this before. Soon after assigning a different volume letter to my media drive, I instinctively rescanned the folders in question, went off to do something else and forgot about it. Of course now it's obvious the "not unique" error is due to the path already existing. The fact that I added files as a playlists the first time and as folders this time made it less obvious. Sorry, hope I didn't waste too much of your time!

[Paul]

Happy to hear you have it all sorted out now.