How to go about deleting all photos *and* albums so as to do a clean "server add"

I have an archive of about 60,000 photos organized in about 1000 date folders and I'm trying to automatically push it to a local gallery instance periodically. The problem is that as the underlying archive is reorganized, the gallery instance becomes increasingly out of date. For instance as the directories are cleaned and consolidated the same folder can get server-added twice.

It *seems* to me that the only feasible option is to clean the instance and do a massive server-add every day or every week.

But I haven't found any docs or anything about how to do this so I just gave it a shot armed only with common sense.

1) Deleting key directories from /var and not touching the mysql db of course just made a massive gallery instance of broken img icons =)

2) Switching to mysql, I tried simply dropping the database, recreating it blank and then kicking apache, thinking maybe the setup logic would restart from scratch. However now the whole instance is dead and saying "Something went wrong!". So, er. that wasn't the right idea at all.

At this point I feel like maybe I'm just failing to find some clear FAQ about doing this. My apologies and great thanks if such a page of docs exists!!

http://codex.galleryproject.org/Gallery3:Modules:folder_sync

Dave
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