Experiments in Updating a Folder Location

[braver]

Recently I've done several consolidations of hard drives, moving everything and trying to Update Folder Location in catalog Browse mode.  Sometimes nothing would happen and I had entries in Catalog Status of a weird kind, like missing sharepoint or one path not being under another.  After a while, I saw that I could not update a location of a folder that was not connected.  Also, I couldn't remove a folder from the catalog that was missing from the file system for a while.  Since it was actually gone I was stuck with nonexisting folders in Browse for a while.  Then one day I selected all the files under them and removed them from the catalog.  That also disappeared the paths!

So my solution to move a folder from one external drive to another was to connect both.  And that worked.  I now have a 56TB RAID 0 drive that will hopefully unify all of the photos for a bit.  What bothered me is a seeming fragility of the Update Folder Path command.  I can't believe I need to have the source path connected.  Is that a general rule or some quirk that overcome my errors? 

One worrisome bug I saw is that the Browse tab showed green light on images under nonexisting paths that were nowhere in the actual filesystem.  Would a Full Sync ensure the catalog knows what's online and what's not, or do I have to redo the whole thing?

[braver]

I must say that moving two 24TB drives onto one 56TB RAID0 array took about 60 hours of copying but only tens of minutes of updating two root folder locations.  Here PMP shines.  Doing a full sync now to be sure.

[ahoward]

Also, I couldn't remove a folder from the catalog that was missing from the file system for a while.  Since it was actually gone I was stuck with nonexisting folders in Browse for a while.  Then one day I selected all the files under them and removed them from the catalog.  That also disappeared the paths!

I'm not sure why one worked and the other didn't but the path shouldn't need to exist for the function to work. I just deleted a folder in Finder and then went to Photo Mechanics Plus's browse tab and removed it and it disappeared. I'm not sure if you tried any of the catalog maintenance tasks but it's possible a "Reintegration" or "Reindex" might have helped out.

Would a Full Sync ensure the catalog knows what's online and what's not, or do I have to redo the whole thing?

Doing a Reintegration might help here as well.

[braver]

I've tried reintegration several time with this catalog, even moved away the state file and had it rebuild one.  I wonder whether I need to redo this catalog.  For now I have it doing a full sync and I loath the idea to redo 50TB 1M photos...