A title like that is pretty ominous considering I just rebuilt my computer, but the damage is not system wide, I’m just dealing with one application.  But as applications go, it’s a big one.  I have to rebuild my Plex library, which means redoing all my playlists and the extensive metadata improvements I had made over time.

After I had gotten all my files moved from my old drives to the new ones, I knew I had to figure out how to restore my Plex database.  I knew there was a backup that ran every 3 days, but I didn’t know where that backup was or how to restore it.  From research on the Plex website, the only thing I really got out of my questions for restoring was to copy the entire data folder from the old computer to the new one.  Well, ok.

And not unlike my amazement at Lightroom’s massive file structure, Plex was the same way.  Tens of thousands of files got copied to my new hard drive, then I reinstalled the server application and fired it up.  No initial errors, which is great, but when I went to the home page and the music library page, all I got was an error message.

In my mind, I sort of expected it.  The reason for that was because I hadn’t installed any application updates in some time.  Why should I?  The features added didn’t pertain to the music portion of Plex, and there weren’t any security fixes, so I never needed them.  Why potentially introduce bugs with a new version if what I had was working fine?

Well, this came back to bite me when I tried to restore a database for an application version much older than what I installed.  And I had no idea what version I had been running before, so there wasn’t an option to install a matching older version.  So there you go.  A mismatched application and database equals a non-functional application.  Time to start over with a new database matching the current application version.

Rebuilding the playlists will be tedious, but I have a pretty good idea of what I want in them, and to be honest, I really only played three or four of them, so I can start there.  The metadata updates will be tedious as well.  I had decided that I was going to use the plex server as my definitive source of collection info.  But now, maybe I will start using Discogs, which can get me info on my collection in greater detail and more expediently, using their mobile app.

I’ve taken a “no rush” attitude with most everything in my life now, so I know eventually it will all work out, when I’m ready for it to happen.

When I was migrating all my files from my old hard drives to my new ones, I had a slight issue where my documents and pictures didn’t copy, because of a permissions difference.  When I resolved it, I had to copy the files again.  This also meant I had to wait for them to copy and stare at the progress as it made its way through.

While copying the pictures, I was stunned as it processed the Lightroom folder.  I had tried out Adobe Lightroom a while ago and ended up not using it because it was just too much.  And now I see it was more than “too much” in the application side, it was outrageous in the data side as well.  I don’t remember how many files I had imported into the Lightroom catalog when I was evaluating it and I didn’t really know what was happening in the backend while it was processing.  But what happened was a new folder was created to hold the catalog and preview files.

Those preview files – holy fuck.  When the copy was complete, I had to see for myself what had actually been done.  I checked the properties of the Lightroom folder and was floored by the result.

28k files and 23k folders!  What the fuck!

It’s not really the size that bothered me.  The thing I didn’t understand was why there are so many files and folders.  And every one is named unintelligibly.  It’s not like you can understand what you are looking at when you dive into those folders.  So why not use some sort of database file instead?  At least then you could get some query functionality out of it.

So it was with great pleasure that I deleted that entire folder.  That’s 50k file entries I don’t have to ever worry about anymore.

A few posts ago, I talked about how I was going to be upgrading my computer to take advantage of new storage.  And that involved swapping out all the important parts of my computer: motherboard, CPU, RAM, and drives.  Well, all the parts came in and sat for a few days, because I know, if I’m going to start a project of this size, it best be in the morning, so I have all day to recover from screwups.  I decided Sunday would be the day and I woke up fairly early to get a start.

The first thing I did was get one last backup of the old computer and break the mirrored drive set.  Then I got to work replacing the guts inside the case.  I spread everything out on the kitchen table, old and new components everywhere.  It all went pretty smoothly and even with taking my time, I was done within an hour.  With everything back in place and ready to go, I brought it back to my office and plugged it in for a smoke test.  All the drives in the computer were blank, so there was nothing to really boot up.

But, to my dismay, I got nothing.  Fans spun up, but no video and no POST beep.  Sigh.  My prior experience says that this is usually a short somewhere.  And what has always been a good troubleshooting step for me is isolation.  So I took everything out of the computer except for the bare minimum.  On startup, no change.  Big sigh.  I took the computer back to the kitchen for some reassembly and inspection.  I didn’t see anything wrong with the mounting posts or anything that could short anything else out.

When in doubt, read the manual, right?  And while I was paging through it looking for some connector I missed or hooked up backwards, I noticed that yes, I did screw something up.  I put the RAM into the wrong slots.  What an idiot.  Ok, fix that up and put everything back together again.  Take it back out to the office and start it up.  Still no video and no beep.  What the fuck.  Back to the kitchen and tear everything back out.  I then decide to consult the Internet, which I know is going to be useless since my symptoms are so vague.  How can I determine if the board or CPU or RAM is bad?  I don’t have extra parts to swap out and isolate the differences.

The first result I clicked on for “no video, no beep” had a confident first response of, “bad power supply.”  Really?  I just changed out this power supply a year ago.  And the old computer was working fine with the same power supply.  BUT, I had no other ideas and I did have a backup power supply (that old post means something now).  And when I put in the new power supply, well, you probably know what happened.  It started up.  I don’t fucking get it.

Now.  Hardware complete, now software.  I had my new M2 SSD drive and my two 8TB drive in the computer ready to go and I had the latest build of Windows 10 on a USB drive.  As has been the case with Windows for some time now, the installation process was quick and easy.  When I went to set up my two big drives to hold all my data, I lost my shit.  Windows installed a recovery partition on one of the big drives.  That totally fucks up my mirroring plan for the drives.  Yeah, it’s time for lunch now.

After a nice calming lunch, I came back and reinstalled Windows without the two 8TB drives attached.  This time, the recovery partition was placed on the proper drive and I was ready to move on.  Before getting into the mass data transfer, I ran Windows update over and over again until I was fully patched.  The last thing I needed was a restart in the middle of my data copy.  It’s around 2:00 right now; about 4 hours of effort so far.

I started creating the virtual drives to hold the files from my old drives and I found out that creating a 1TB file is not a quick process.  It’s something like a hour or more of waiting.  Then the file copy is nothing speedy either.  I got the 50GB drive copied over and started working on the first 1TB drive – the first of three.  While that’s going, I installed software from the Internet that I didn’t have on my archive drive.  That’s one thing about this process is that there’s dependencies, where I can’t do this until this other thing is done first.  And one of the big ones is that I can’t install a lot of software until I get all the data copied over.  So I must work and wait.

To be continued….

Sometimes, well, maybe more than sometimes, I am prone to impulsiveness.  I’ll get an idea and the more I can justify that idea, through a series of tiny connections, the more likely it is I am going to act on it.  Sometimes, I can stave it off by focusing on the financial aspects of the idea, and other times, it seems the cost isn’t really important or maybe I do more rationalizing of how the cost is justified.  And that is where I’m at today.

This whim is technology-based, so it hits on a few different pleasure points.  It’s a new idea for me, so there’s the novelty of trying it out.  It’s an improvement, so I can justify that it has value.  It supports another of my on-again, off-again obsessions – archival, so there’s indirect benefit as well.

So here’s the idea, which probably won’t make any sense to non-technical people.  I’m going to replace all the hard disks in my computer, and make all the drives virtual.  I’m using some terms very specifically there (and I’ll be inconsistent everywhere else) – I say “disks” to describe the physical hard drives and “drives” to mean the individual drive letters.  Most people have a C:\ drive on their one hard disk.  My system is a bit more complex, for organizational purposes.

Here’s what my computer’s Disk Manager shows.

I have five hard drives in my computer, one of which is an external USB drive.  What you see in the image is that C: is one hard drive, D: and S: are on another drive, and Y: and L: are paired up on two mirrored drives.  The M: drive is a virtual drive whose file is held on L:.  The B: drive is the external USB.

If you look at the free space of my drives, the M: drive is on 6% free.  This drive holds all my music files, so if you’ve read any of my blog, you would know this space is going to run out soon.  Then there’s other little things that are bothersome.  D: has 95% space free, but I can’t really use it for anything because it’s unmirrored (and thus vulnerable to a drive failure), and also, it’s on another drive anyway.

So, again, here’s the plan.  Get rid of Disk 1, 2, and 3 and replace them with two 8TB mirrored drives.  Right there, that’s nearly 4x my current storage.  Then I could create D:, S:, Y:, and L: all on that mirrored drive.  That would be cool and all, but when it comes to resizing and reorganizing partitions, it can get messy.  For example, taking 100GB from D: and adding some of it to S:, you end up with broken pieces of the drive.

To avoid this, and be cool and modern in the process, I’ll do with all my drives what I did with the M: drive.  Everything will be its own virtual drive stored on the mirrored disks.  To reiterate, M: is actually a file on the L: drive.  M: is 500GB and L: has a 500GB file on it.  With my new design, I’ll have one massive 8TB drive, with five large files on it, one for the D: drive, one for the S: drive, etc.

What’s that gain me?  In the case of Disk 1, shown above, it would just be one partition, D:.  S: would be on a totally different disk, say Disk 5.  The drive will always consume 100% of the disk it is on – no sharing or splitting.  So when I expand or shrink the virtual disk, it will always be 100% consumed by the drive.  The change in free space will be reflected in the 8TB drive hosting the file.

What else do I get out of it?  Well, I don’t have to use up the 8TB right away.  I can build a temporary drive for whatever purpose and destroy it when I’m done with it.  That’s kind of the way things are here at my workplace.  We have a massive drive array and whenever we need a new server, we just carve out some drive space and make a new server.  It’s one step closer to me having a entirely virtualized network.  Also, by not using up all the space at once, I can grow the individual drives as they need it.  I don’t have to try and anticipate how much I’ll be using.

Looking back in history, the last time I discussed my computer storage was over five years ago.  So that’s actually a really good run for the 2TB drives I’m using now.  It’s one more bit of justification for me to indulge my whim.