Does Rules under File Placement apply to folders or files alone?

[paulml]

Hi, I have been micromanaging the placement of folders thru the Folders tab under File Placement. I then came across this post from years ago which suggests that I can use the Rules tab under File Placement to organize the folders alphabetically like so:

\TV-Shows\A*  --->  HDD-1

\TV-Shows\B*  --->  HDD-2

\TV-Shows\C*  --->  HDD-3

This should place all subfolders under "TV-Shows" that starts with "A" to HDD-1 and so on. I've always thought the Rules tab was for files and not folders. I would just like to confirm if it indeed works for folders as well and if the above example would work? I couldn't find an activity log to test out the rule and check to see for myself. Thanks!

[Shane]

Correct. The rules are checked against the full path of files, which includes their folder(s).

For example a rule of \TV-Shows\A* would match both \TV-Shows\Allshowslist.txt and \TV-Shows\AcmeShow\EpisodeOne.mp4 and place them accordingly.

If you wanted to match the latter but not the former then you would instead use a rule of \TV-Shows\A*\* to do so.

[paulml]

1 hour ago, Shane said:

Correct. The rules are checked against the full path of files, which includes their folder(s).

For example a rule of \TV-Shows\A* would match both \TV-Shows\Allshowslist.txt and \TV-Shows\AcmeShow\EpisodeOne.mp4 and place them accordingly.

If you wanted to match the latter but not the former then you would instead use a rule of \TV-Shows\A*\* to do so.

I believe your 2nd example is exactly what I'm looking for! 

Just to confirm, if I want to (theoretically) split folder names alphabetically with each letter going to its own separate HDD, I should set up rules as so:

\TV-Shows\A*\*  --->  HDD-01

\TV-Shows\B*\*  --->  HDD-02

\TV-Shows\C*\*  --->  HDD-03

and so on until....

\TV-Shows\Z*\*  --->  HDD-26

Sorry, just wanted to make sure before I make a significant change Thank you very much for the help! 

[Shane]

Correct. And:

On 7/5/2023 at 10:41 AM, paulml said:

I couldn't find an activity log to test out the rule and check to see for myself.

Try "resmon" (aka the Windows Resource Monitor) to see files that are currently being read/written. Open it, click on the "Disk" tab, find the "Disk Activity" section; you can click on a column header to sort (and toggle ascending/descending). You can also click the checkboxes in the "Processes with Disk Activity" section to filter by process.

Try "everything" (made by voidtools.com) to quickly see all files that are on any letter-mounted physical NTFS volume on a machine (amongst other tricks). And you could for example type in "Acme\EpisodeOne" and it would immediately show you which disks in the pool (so long as those disks have drive letters) have files that match that string.