Keeping metadata when moving files?

Question

I have LR 2.6. I have a laptop which doesn't have enough disk space for all of my photos, which go back to 2000 (around 22,000). I have three external drives, one is the main one and the other two are backups at this point (smaller space). I need to get another.
I had been importing the photos from the card to my laptop. In the past I've been able to keep a year on the laptop, but with my current camera I don't have enough room, just enough for a couple of months. What I had been doing is copying the older ones to the external drive outside of LR, and deleting them from the laptop, not realizing that I was losing my keywords, titles and I'm not sure what else. I didn't have the settings to create xmp files until recently. The last time I moved files I did it within LR, but it only moved the RAW files, not the xmp.
I had also been keeping all the data in one catalog. I went back to an older one that had a lot of what I'd lost and tried to update that, but there are still around 1,300 files without keywords. And now I have metadata conflicts (not sure if that's from the xmp settings or not).
1-What's the best way to deal with this so that I don't lose my info?
2-Is there any way to easily tell what the conflict is, or at least be able to tell in general where the "best" metadata is?
3-Is there any way to merge metadata from a selection of files to another catalog?
4-And if not answered in one of the above, what's the best way to fix this mess?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The last time I moved files I did it within LR, but it only moved the RAW files, not the xmp.
This can't possibly be correct . If the .xmp file exists, and you move the photo within LR, the xmp moves with it.
I had also been keeping all the data in one catalog. I went back to an older one that had a lot of what I'd lost and tried to update that, but there are still around 1,300 files without keywords. And now I have metadata conflicts (not sure if that's from the xmp settings or not).
I think the only way you can have a metadata conflict is a conflict between the catalog's metadata and the xmp metadata.
1-What's the best way to deal with this so that I don't lose my info?
2-Is there any way to easily tell what the conflict is, or at least be able to tell in general where the "best" metadata is?
3-Is there any way to merge metadata from a selection of files to another catalog?
4-And if not answered in one of the above, what's the best way to fix this mess?
There is no best way to fix this mess. Any way to fix it is probably going to involve a lot of tedious work on your part to straighten things out.
You can merge the metadata from the older catalog into the newer catalog. In the older catalog, select the desired photos and then File->Export as Catalog. Then, in the newer catalog, select File->Import from Catalog. This will cause LR to replace the metadata in the new catalog with the metadata in the older catalog. An alternative when you Import from Catalog is to tell LR to create virtual copies, so you have both sets of metadata in a single LR catalog, which you can then view and decide which one you want to keep.
Good luck