How to move scraped data (skyscraper) to USB drive?

[elitist]

• Raspberry Pi 4, 4GB
• Official Power Supply
• RetroPie 4.7.1 built from official SD image
• 32GB SD card
• 256GB USB storage connected
• 8bitdo bluetooth SN30 Pro

I followed the guide for running roms from USB and it seemed to work fine, loading roms from /media/usb/retropie-mount/roms.

Unfortunately, my SD card ran out of space after running running Skyscraper for a few systems. So, I decided to move all the scraped files to the USB drive as well.

After reading the skyscraper docs, I made these changes...

• added these lines to the [main] section of /home/pi/.skyscraper/config.ini (my full config.ini is here):

inputFolder="/media/usb/retropie-mount/roms"
gameListFolder="/media/usb/retropie-mount/roms"
mediaFolder="/media/usb/retropie-mount/roms/media"
cacheFolder="/media/usb/retropie-mount/skyscrapercache"

• moved /home/pi/.skyscraper/cache to /media/usb/retropie-mount/skyscrapercache
• ran skyscraper from retropie_setup and generated the gamelists for all systems

However, now all my scraped data has disappeared. The names of the games have gone back to the file names, all metadata is gone, and there is no artwork--it's back to the way it was before ever running the scraper.

Probably related, there are many lines that look like this that I can see after exiting emulationstation (transcribing because I do not know how to view relevant log files)

File path "/media/usb/retropie-mount/roms/snes/Zoop (USA).zip" is outside system path "home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes"
Error finding/creating FileData for "/media/usb/retropie-mount/roms/snes/Zoop (USA).zip", skipping.

Did I do something wrong? Miss a step or many? Thanks for the help.

[sleve_mcdichael]

@elitist as I understand it, that method mounts the USB drive “over” the /home/pi/RetroPie directory, so whenever you access that directory, you are actually accessing the USB drive. That’s the whole point, I thought, you just continue to use that folder as normal and the system puts it on the USB drive “behind the scenes.” Try pointing your config paths there, instead of /media/usb/retropie-mount. For example:

inputFolder="/home/pi/RetroPie/roms"
gameListFolder="/home/pi/RetroPie/roms"
mediaFolder="/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/media"
cacheFolder="/home/pi/RetroPie/skyscrapercache"

[mitu]

Change just the cache folder's location, that should be enough.

[elitist]

@sleve_mcdichael @mitu thanks for the help. I reversed all the changes I made except for the location of the cache, just like in @sleve_mcdichael's example. Everything seems to be working now.