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?