how to move the .hist database???

[riflesniper]

hello, i've been trying to move the .hist database from the drive my OS is on to another larger drive in my computer, but i haven't been successful. my .hist folder has gotten up to 77(!) gigabytes, it's a bit heavy to have all that on my smaller primary drive.

the docs say to set the hist to a new folder in the config menu, like so:

[global]
   hist: /mnt/directory

so i did that and restarted copyparty, but i'm not seeing any new folders pop up in the folder i created. i don't know if there's something i'm missing, since the docs only said to change the directory in the config folder. do i need to delete the original database folder?? the details for this aren't really made clear at all...

[darekwojciechowski]

Your config is right — the reason nothing appears at the new path is that copyparty never migrates or deletes the old .hist. It just starts writing new state at the new location, and only when a volume actually initialises its database. The old 77 GB sits there untouched until you move it yourself.

So to answer your direct question: yes, you have to deal with the original folder manually. You can literally move the contents rather than deleting them, which preserves your index instead of forcing a full rescan:

mv /path/to/volume/.hist/* /mnt/directory/

A few things to check if the new folder still stays empty:

Make sure the config file is actually being loaded — it only applies if you start copyparty with -c /path/to/config.conf. Quickest way to rule this out is to skip the config entirely and pass --hist /mnt/directory straight on the command line. If folders show up that way, the problem was config loading, not the setting.

Indexing has to be on for there to be a database at all (-e2d, -e2ds or -e2dsa). Given the folder grew to 77 GB you clearly have it enabled, but worth confirming it's still set.

Check for a per-volume hist volflag overriding the global. A volume with hist: - in its flags is explicitly opted back into the in-volume .hist, which would look exactly like the global being ignored.

One thing worth knowing given the size: at 77 GB that's almost entirely thumbnails and audio transcodes, not the database — the sqlite db is usually a tiny fraction of it. hist moves the whole lot, which is what you want here. (--dbpath exists too but only relocates the db, so it wouldn't help you.)

After restart, look under /mnt/directory for per-volume subfolders each containing an up2k.db. That's the confirmation it's live.