CSV usage - collection manager tasks (newbie)

If you have read the articles about CSV files - an introduction and CSV - stages of evolution, then you now know that csv files are used to index your files into reasonable chronological chunks, most often DVD chunks.

This article is about which tasks there is in organizing your files so that they match those csvs. To utilize csv files you must use a program. Much in the same way you would a BitTorrent Client and a .torrent file. The programs in question are Collection Manager tools. This article is not about a specific collection manager program, but instead of the general tasks within these programs.´

Directories:
There are a minimum of 4 directories involved with a collection manager. The first one is the directory where you will keep all your csv files. This directory is referred to as your csv folder. The second directory involved is the directory for your reports. Reports are text files which hold the result between your multimedia files and your csv files. The csv folder and the report folder need to be 2 different places. The 3rd directory involved is your collection folder. The collection folder is the place where you keep all your CD's or DVD's, this is the folder where your Hegre.-Art-DVD41 folder and data will reside. The last folder is your download folder. This is where you dump all your data before they get organized. Stuff from usenet, websites and every other place where you get data from.

1. CSV folder
2. Report folder
3. Collection folder
4. Download folder

You will need to configure your collection manager for these 4 directories as a minimum. You can have multiple collection folders aswell as multiple download folders. Start off by copying your csv files to the csv folder. Empty the folder for the reports, copy what you do have into the collection folder in the proper sub folders. Do a little cleanup in your download folder.

Setting up the first collection:
The next thing is to find a csv for some of the stuff you do have and know should match some files. Let's pretend that you know you have some files which supposedly should belong to Hegre-Art-DVD41. So find the Hegre-Art-DVD41 csv on a csv site and download it. Use the collection manager to setup a new collection with the csv you have downloaded. And point the collection towards the directory where you have stored the files from Hegre-Art-DVD41.

Check:
Depending on the tools of choice then the collection manager will check the files you have in the directory, against the files specified in the csv. The csv for HGRARDVD41 (the trigger name for the csv in question) has 1673 files registered. After the collection manager has checked the files on your harddrive, then it will have show you how many files you have complete, compared to the csv. If everything is there and match 100% then you get a count of 1673 and a missing/wrong count of 0.

If you get a missing/wrong count which is above 0, then some files are missing or not the original files which matches the csv. This means that even though you may be able to view the picture or watch the video, then someone has altered something in the file. Theas files will me moved to a directory outside the collections directory. If you are lucky then the files which does not match the csv you are checking, will match to some other csv, let's say HGRARDVD40 as example. The directory where the bad files reside in is a good source as a 'hunt' directory.

Hunting:
Hunting is the term used to scan and look for files which match a csv. Often you would hunt from your download folder, which possibly contains alot of ramdom files, jpg, avi, mov, rar, zip etc. The files which are discarded by a check may match other csvs. You will have to empty you "bad files" directory from time to time, unless you have unlimited space and wants to keep stuff which does not match anywhere. Modern Collection Management tools can look inside zip and rar files. So there is no need to extract the files yourself, unless there is some damage to the archive. You can configure the Collection Management to hunt from any number of files residing on multiple sources. When hunting the Collection Management tools are able to delete a found file from the hunt directory if it matches a csv, thus cleaning your hunt folder while hunting. This ability also goes for the files inside zip and rar archives.

Reports:
Everytime you check or hunt then the Collection Management tool will produce a report. This text file will show detailed information about which files are good and which files are bad. Also information about sizes can be found in the report. The report can be used in various ways, both by the tool and you. The reports are especially useful when you have collections on offline storage.