 skip hmmm how about you create empty data ham set NUMBER stuff all your files into a data ham reservoir folder then run the URL script to randomly parcel messages out to the various real directories i m afraid rebal is quadratic time in the of msgs it shuffles around since it was only intended to move a few files around it s dead simple an easy thing is to start the same way move all the files into a single directory then do random shuffle on an os listdir of that directory then it s trivial to split the result into n slices and move the files into n other directories accordingly i suspect you can pull the same stunt for your data spam stuff yup 