Questions re External Hard Drive

[dbvirago]

I have some questions regarding my external drive(s). I looked through the docs but couldn't find the relevant help. Please point me in the right direction if I missed it.

My main images 50K or so are on my local hard drive. It is where I do all processing and keep finished Jpgs.

I have large external hard drives that contain all original, unprocessed raw and jpgs, multiple old output folders from various jobs and a complete backup of my internal drive. One of the externals is an older one, so is a subset of the larger one. I may or may not add that one as it is mostly redundant.

I have the internal drive loaded into iMatch and that's fine.

I would also like iMatch to catalog all the external files to make them easy to find.

My problems/questions are:

How will iMatch handle the dupes?

What happens when the external is disconnected.

I'm thinking I should create a second database for the externals, does that make sense?

What else should I know?

[Mario]

IMatch can handle all drives or network shares accessible by Windows.

IMatch does not do anything special with what you consider 'dupes'.
If the same file exists in multiple folders and/or drives, IMatch just adds it several times to your database. IMatch does not know if these are precious backups or if your image collection is not in a good shape and you have produced duplicate files accidentally.

You can use the Search > Duplicates command to find all duplicates for the files currently selected in a File Window.

If you want IMatch to place duplicate files into a category (e.g. named "DUPES") you can enable the corresponding option under Edit > Preferences > Indexing before you index the external hard disk. See Indexing

In general, having the same file multiple times in your DAM is usually an error.

• If the file is a backup, it should be treated as such and not actively managed (not in your DAM)
• If the file is just a duplicate because of some typical chaos or previous manual management of files in Windows Explorer, you should clear it up (aka detect and delete the duplicate).
  It is preferable to have each file only once, in one location, and with one set of metadata.