Move your media to a new drive

When a library folder moves, because you copied your media to a bigger drive, a drive failed and you restored from a backup, or a share got a new mount path, tell tofa the folder moved. We then point every existing item at the same file in its new place. Matches, posters and artwork you chose, watch history, and intro and credit markers all stay as they are.

Move a folder#

1. Open Admin, then Libraries, and pick the library.
2. Under Name & folders, change the path of the old folder to the new location. Edit the existing folder; don't add the new location as an extra folder.
3. Save, then run a scan.

Do this for each library that had a folder on the old drive.

If you already added the new location as an extra folder, remove that extra folder first, then edit the old one. Nothing has been catalogued from the extra folder yet, so you lose nothing.

What has to match#

A move keeps the folder and file names inside the folder and only swaps its start. /mnt/old/Movies/Alien (1979)/Alien.mkv becomes /mnt/new/Movies/Alien (1979)/Alien.mkv. The new location needs the same layout inside it as the old one had:

• A file at the same place in the new folder keeps its item.
• A file that sits somewhere else, or has a different name, is found as new and matched again. Its old item is marked unavailable, and you can clear it from the library's maintenance options.

If your backup copy did not keep the original file dates, we treat those files as changed. They keep their match and watch history, but intro and credit detection runs again for them in the background.

If one old folder's contents now live in several places, move it to the one that holds most of them and add the others as new folders.

In Docker#

The server only sees folders you map into the container. Map the new drive first, restart the container, and use the path as the container sees it, for example /media/movies, not the path on the host.

Moving versus removing#

Removing a folder removes its titles from the library, along with their watch history and any matches or artwork you fixed. Files on disk are never touched. Removing a folder and adding the new one is not a move, so if the files are the same, edit the path instead.

While a drive is unplugged, scans of that library stop and nothing is marked unavailable, so your library does not empty itself while the drive is away. Put the drive back, or move the folder, and the next scan picks up where it left off.

Still stuck? Getting help & feedback covers what to send us.