Building The Database
 

I need help understanding the process of building the database. I have two external hard drives which have karaoke tracks on them. The first drive is my working drive for karaoke files and had been used with my Compaq laptop and Acer laptop for home use. When my Compaq computer went bad, I bought my current Lenovo laptop and also bought another external drive mainly for use as an auto backup drive. At that time I included a copy of Karaoke files that were on my working karaoke external drive. So then I had two external hard drives one for karaoke and the other new one to use as an auto backup for all information on my Lenovo laptop, but not on my working hard drive.

Since then, I've added karaoke tracks to my working drive and then decided to to edit my working drive to correct spelling and other errors, to delete duplicate songs and sort through my tracks and indicate which one is the best. I have some dupes that are mux, and non-mux, so I keep both. The mux is used to learn the song, and the other is used to sing the song if the mux is not the best track.

I've put a lot of hours into editing my database only to learn that half way through the three days of editing I ended up with the wrong drive being used to rebuild my database. I can access both drives and I now know I added the files to my working drive and by looking at the date of some of the files I could tell I started editing on that drive. Somehow I was switched to the back-up drive and then I spent the last few days editing those files rather than the working drive. I was able to copy most of tracks I edited to a temp file, but now need to figure out how to replace them for the ones on the working drive. I think I'm in a mess and will just have to go back to the working drive and start editing it all over again.

So to clarify my understanding in simple terms, when I build the database, I need to select the folder where the working drive files are stored and exclude the folder in the back-up drive. When the database is built, then Hoster will look for the tracks in the working drive and not in the backup drive. When I want to edit Hoster will only open the working drive tracks and they can then be edited. The songbook is based on what is in the database so any change requires a change in the songbook. Is my understanding correct, or am I missing something?

Thanks for any feedback you can provide, and if you know a way I can save three days worth of editing, please share it with me.

Re: Building The Database
 

First off do you always have both the back up external hard drive and your working hard drive connected all the time ?
If so it is safest to connect both drives before starting your computer
Or do you just swap them when necessary ?
If you swap them when necessary or connect them in random order you have to be aware that windows sometimes changes their volume letter, Example if you made your working hard drive E and your backup drive F it is quite possible that if you plug in The backup drive F without the other drive connected windows may change that to E as well without you realizing it.

Yes,

.If you do have both drives connected all the time then as you suggest excluding that folder should be the answer

Where you saved those files to a temporary file why can't you just copy & Paste them over the original files then either rebuild the database or highlight the folder containing them and select Rescan.

One thing I keep a backup of myself is the complete "Hoster folder" which is found in C:/MTU/Hoster this contains records of all your Playlists, Songs.Mdb, Singers Mdb and lots of other recoverable data.

Re: Building The Database
 

Roy,

Except for the time I use the karaoke working drive with the Acer netbook, the working drive and the auto back-up drive are connected. The working drive is "F" and the back-up is "D".

Based on your suggestion to keep a back-up of C:/MTU/Hoster files, I checked and my back-up drive has copied those files and continues to copy them as they are updated.

I believe what happened is I edited some tracks and then used the build database function and there were three folders, one for C one for F and one for D. I guess when I did the re-build I mashed them all together, because I noticed that during the process, the indicator box indicated much more files than I had in F. However, when the re-build was finished it indicated I had about the same number of files as I had in F.

So how do I perform your suggestion: "Where you saved those files to a temporary file why can't you just copy & Paste them over the original files then either rebuild the database or highlight the folder containing them and select Rescan."? Won't that just add more files to my working drive rather than change them?

Thanks for your input, now I have a basic idea about how the database works. I also believe now that after editing there is no need to do a re-build, just redo the songbook. At least that's my impression.

Thanks again,

Re: Building The Database
 

The only thing here is if it is too up to date and you want to restore something as it was a week or so ago you may not be able to because it is copying it continuously. As I do a lot of the Beta testing I make a copy of the previous Hoster file before I install a beta version, then if something in the beta version corrupts anything I always have a copy of how it was previously. If I used auto backup for this it would probably copy the corrupted data and I would still be in trouble. So if you see what I'm saying, a copy taken just prior to you performing any updates or major editing and saved seperate from your auto backup could be your Saviour.
Yes, you seem to understand how the list works, just remove folders that could have the duplicate files in, which in your case is "D" then if necessary rebuild [/quote]
Not if you copy the files inside the temporary folder to the folder containing the original files, it will overwrite the original, you will probably get a dialog appear asking if you want to replace the existing or save both, choose to overwrite. This is not adding the temporary folder to the rebuild list just the files inside the temporary folder.,[/quote]
Normally after editing you would not need to rebuild the database but if you copy the files from the temporary folder as above you may need to rebuild as this is doing something outside of the edit dialog.

Re: Building The Database
 

Don't know if this will help you or not, but I use Allway Sync. It's an awesome program to keep your hard drives duplicated. Try the free version @... http://allwaysync.com/?a=1