External Image Hard Drive Issue

[asislen]

I'm hoping someone will be able to help be solve a problem I'm having. I'm running LR CC 2015.7 and Mac OS X 10.11.6. I keep my images on an external 8tb HGST drive that is in a dock and have no problems or issues. I recently bought an external 8tb G-Technology RAID, that is set for RAID 0. I want to use this drive as an exact duplicate of my 8tb HGST drive for all my images when I teach outside of my studio.

Here's the issue. I copied my entire 8tb HGST drive over to the 8tb G-Technology RAID. So far, so good. So the LR catalog would be happy with either (not both) drive attached to my computer, using the Finder, with the 8tb HGST drive ejected, I gave the G-Technology RAID the same "name" as my 8tb HGST drive. With only the G-Technology 8tb RAID attached, Lightroom recognizes all the images (no "!'s" or grayed out file folders). Everything seems to work perfectly with one exception. If I right-click on any file folder in the Folders left panel, and choose Synchronize Folder, the Synchronize dialogue box opens and it says it needs to Import every image in the folder as a new image, and that it will Remove the same number of missing photos from the catalog.

I have ejected the 8tb G-Technology RAID and plugged the external 8tb HGST drive back in. If I right-click on any folder and select Synchronize Folder, it comes back with 0 files needed to be synchronized.

I'm totally confused! If both my drives have the exact same name and only one is plugged in at a time and if both drives contain exactly the same images, and if there are no "!'s" or grayed out folders with "?'s" with either drive, then why does LR think it needs to do a Synchronize the folders on my 8tb G-Technology RAID?

Any help or suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

I can't answer the question specifically asked, but I would suggest that what you are trying to do -- fool the software into thinking each disk is the same disk -- is ultimately not a good idea.

I have no idea if Lightroom checks, but the underlying operating system knows the difference from unique ID's on the disk itself. Even files will have different internal ID's despite being a perfect sync (but I do not think LR looks at those either).

Just decades of working around computers tells me when you try to fool the system, it gets cranky and extracts retribution later.

Is there a problem you are trying to solve, that may be amenable to some more typical solution?