Heavy Disk Management

April 14, 2009 12:09 PM

The company I work for has just installed a shared media solution for Final Cut Pro. It's basically a RAID array that two to three work stations access via Fiber Channel. We now have to move 10+ terabytes of material to the media server... and organize it.

there's the rub. what solutions (commercial, shareware, or other) are available for managing data, so that we can check for dupe files and organize our media and assets efficiently before, during and/or after the move. Basically, I'd love to be able to open an app, tell it to go through the new drive array and say "where are the duplicate files? give me options to delete the dupes." and "where are the quicktime movies? give me an option to move them all to a specific folder."

am I dreaming, or is this something that exists?

oh, and we're talking about OS X.

posted by shmegegge to media & arts (9 comments total)

Dunno about the dupes, but on Windows the built-in search mechanism allows you to simply search for all files of a particular file type, then doing a select-all and dragging from the search window to a folder moves the files to that folder. I would expect something in OS X can do the same.
posted by XMLicious at 12:16 PM on April 14

oh, and I also meant to ask (my bad. sorry.) if any of the final cut users out there have any tips for media management. it would be fantastic if I could tag media based on who's present in the shot and such, so that I could then search through the vastness of our media archive for material related to that person, as a ferinstance.
posted by shmegegge at 12:26 PM on April 14

That array you're talking about is probably some flavour of SAN, Storage Area network. Apple's branded solution/product/management tool is called XSAN. This might help clarify what you're looking for.
posted by now i'm piste at 12:31 PM on April 14

Basically, I'd love to be able to open an app, tell it to go through the new drive array and say "where are the duplicate files? give me options to delete the dupes." and "where are the quicktime movies? give me an option to move them all to a specific folder."

For your FC network, Xsan and its Spotlight functionality might help you, in conjunction with Automator for acting on search results.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:32 PM on April 14

Forget that it's shared, since you're mounting it as a local drive anyway. Look for utilities to help you find duplicates on "your own" hard drive. Spring Cleaning is the first one that comes to mind, but I know I have seen others in passing, too.
posted by rokusan at 12:48 PM on April 14

Erm. FinalCut Server w/XSAN.
posted by mmdei at 1:08 PM on April 14

That array you're talking about is probably some flavour of SAN,

this is exactly correct. it's a 3rd party SAN solution. sorry for the confusion.
posted by shmegegge at 1:46 PM on April 14

Final Cut Studio 2? Apple has a application-specific server product that is for managing data to be used with FCP.
posted by mrg at 2:10 PM on April 14

For just the duplicate files part, I find fdupes very good.
posted by devnull at 2:33 PM on April 14