How do I get my AE system to move existing inventory to barrels through storage interfaces?

Question

I'm trying to offload some stuff that I don't really need to keep on drives to some barrels, and I'm using storage interfaces to do it. I managed to get quite a few things that I'll need eventually from running quarries off my drives for now, so I have the convenience of moving the barrels around as needed until I actually need the stuff.

This is what I did:

1. Put storage buses on each barrel, connected them, made sure they came online
2. Put one of each item I want to send to barrels in its respective barrel
3. Configured the buses using the barrel inventory, set the priority for it higher than the drive

This works, but only stuff that comes into the system after doing that ends up in the barrels. I want my AE system to put what it has on the drive in the barrels, and I can't figure out an easy way to make it do that. In order to coax it, I did the following:

1. Partitioned a drive just to accept the items I want put in the barrels
2. Put the drive in an I/O port, set to export items
3. Put the drive back in the I/O port, set to import items
4. Items ended up in barrels as expected

However this is a pain, as I have almost a hundred different types I want to move to simpler storage. Is there no way to poke my system into just dumping what it has on the drives into storage bus connected inventories without going through the hassle of taking the stuff out of the system entirely and then putting it back? Do I really need to use export buses first, and then replace them with storage buses?

I've tried fiddling with the bus controls, setting them to export only, etc - nothing seems to trigger my system into saying "Oh look, here's a place to put [item], let's put all of that there" - and that's what I'm trying to accomplish.

(AE2 on 1.7.10 / DW20 FTB Server)

Answer 1

AE does not (as far as I've seen) automatically swap where items are stored when using storage busses, so you are going to need some method of exporting the items and then reimporting them.

There is as you said the (manual labor intensive) option of formatting an empty drive, filling it up via an IO port and then emptying it via IO port. This is probably the fastest method if you don't count the manual bits.

Another option that I like is to take advantage of the fact that AE will pull from inventories with lower priorities first, and then insert into a higher priority first (do note that this is also aware of subnet priorities).

So what I do:

• Make sure the barrel either has at least one item in it (it can also be locked to an item type, same thing as far as AE is concerned) or that the storage bus is configured to only allow one type of item in it.
• Make sure the barrel has a higher priority than the ME Chest/ME Drive.

And then you take a chest, put an import bus (loaded with acceleration cards for speed) and an export bus (more acceleration cards) on it, and configure the export bus to start exporting whatever you want in the barrel.

Each time the export bus takes a stack it is taken from the disks you are using, and every time the import bus imports something it is put into the barrel. Not quite as fast as the IO port option, but you can set this up and leave it without an issue for the next barrel you want to fill, only thing needed to disable/enable it is to change what the export bus is exporting.