Moving files from multiple drives to single drive

[John S C]

My image library has built up over the years and when one external drive got full I purchased a second slightly larger one etc.

I now really want to consolidate all the small drives into one large 3Tb RAID drive. My question is which is the quickest way to move the files off the other drives onto the new one. There is about 1.5 Tb of files spread out over 3 drives. Is it best to simply move the files to their new home via Lightroom, so it knows where they are. Or is it quicker to simply copy them to the new drive and point Lightroom to the directories when it can't find them.

My gut feel is to let Lightroom do the work, but I wonder if there is a serious  time penalty this way

Any observation welcomed

John C

[john beardsworth]

With a big job like this, I would copy your drives' contents to the new one using Explorer/Finder, and take great care to replicate the same folder structure that you currently have.

Once that's done, take a backup of your LR catalogue, then right click the parent folders in Lightroom and choose update folder location. Point to the new location, and you should be done.

I'd do it this way not because of time, which would be roughly the same either way (maybe slower in LR), but more because of certainty. If you did it in LR and something went wrong during the moving process, it would be a lot messier to sort out. The above way means your existing setup will remain there until you're sure everything is in its new place.

John

[John S C]

John

Thanks for the advice. That certainly seems the best way to go about things without the risk of data loss, which was my main concern.

I'll do as you suggest, I'll start with the smallest drive and then progress with the others. If in the unlikely event something goes wrong, I've lost nothing.