Restoring from backup / transfering music to external drive

@AMOOR > Hopefully I can help and you can stop pulling your hair out!

Okay, so your music is all located on the external drive and you have also moved your master database to the external drive. This is your primary source and NOT your export device (although it could be used as both, I don't recommend it).

The instructions you followed (regarding the XML file) are out of date and unnecessary when moving the master database. It could be the changes you made there which are causing some tracks not to be located. Have you tried doing a mass relocation from the "all tracks" view of the library, selecting all songs and then right-click > relocate? Provided all tracks have moved in the same manner (the parent drive / folder has changed), the first relocation should set the software to find all the others.

Hi Pulse, and thanks for your reply.

Yes, I have done this. It finds the tracks within that folder, but no other tracks. Even though I have music elsewhere on my old HD, most of it is inside the 'music' folder, so I copied that whole folder to the external HD and did as described numerous times, with numerous tracks. It says it has found say 400 tracks of a few thousand, but in reality it has only found a handful within the folder that the track it is looking for is in. This is the first thing I did, as per the updated instructions.

So 2 issues I have at the moment :

a) The biggest issue, none of my music can be located (and I really shouldn't be doing this manually)

b) Exponentially smaller issue, yet still frustrating - I resotored from a backup AFTER backing up, and its restored from an older version with no sign of the latest backup (which had been backed up numerous times).

To help - all other obvious things are correct (my HDs are fine, OS all updated, same version of rekordbox and nothing else obvious that could have been overlooked. Reinstalled rekordbox on new machine, tried it on different machine just incase but exact same issue).

This weekend Ill be travelling once more with 2 laptops because of this issue and I could really do without looking like a spoilt bratt at airports lol. Really I would have expected there to be an easier way, such as simply copying all audio files in rekordboxes collection to a new folder (such as itunes can do) and then pointing rekordbox to this new folder before exporting the program files, so that when the program files are installed on the new system it also looks into this new location. I'm sure this would be extremely useful for a lot of people, considering they may want a new machines HD that isn't an exact clone of their old one? Or maybe once more I'm missing something?

ps : to clarify - when it states that it has found X amount of files after it has finished a mass relocate, it has only actually found the files within that folder (which is a small percentage of X). I don't know if it has actually detected X amount but not let Rekordboxes collection know (or changed the XML) which points to a bug, or again I'm missing something (maybe it has detected X amount of tracks that aren't in the collection any more, again pointing to an xml issue).

Many thanks for your swift response above by the way, it is much appreciated.

pps : Ignore my references to xml above, I think I'm getting confused and tired and trying to push a solution onto you when I have no idea :)

Hello. I suggest you do transfer the entire collection of rekordbox level. That would be great. Because at 3 laptops it is a hassle, and God forbid fall at the main computer disc that is a problem with the collection. To be able to transfer collections using an external drive without any additional copying files.