I’ve got a whole bucket full of old hard drives, CDs and DVDs, and I’m starting the process of backing up as much as still works to a 4TB drive.
It’s gonna be a long journey and lots of files, many prone to being duplicates from some of the drives.
What sorts of software do you Linux users recommend?
I’m on Linux Mint MATE, if that matters much.
Edit: One of the programs I’m accustomed to from my Windows days is FolderMatch, which is a step above simple duplicate file scanning, it scans for duplicate or semi-duplicate folders as well and breaks down individual file differences when comparing two folders.
I see I’ve already gotten some responses, and I thank everyone in advance. I’m on a road trip right now, I’ll be checking you folks recommend software later this evening or as soon as I can anyways.
That is filesystem-level. Btrfs and i think ZFS? have deduplication built in.
Btrfs gave me 150 GB on my 2 TB gaming disk that way.
fdupes to find duplicate files, freefilesync to back it up.
Not recommending software. As you mentioned old hard disks, it is better to copy the files or better dd them on a ssd. That way making index and finding duplicates will be faster cause you’ve to access files once and not care about fragmentation if you dd.
For duplicates: Czkawka. Also, you get a gold ⭐ if you can figure out how to pronounce it 😉
Nightly rsync job in crontab works well enough, if its an external hard drive.
If you’re going over a network, syncthing.
I’ve abused syncthing in some many ways migrating servers and giant data sets. It’s freaking amazing. Though it’s been a few years since I’ve used it. Can only guess how much better it’s gotten.
Isnt syncthing no longer supported?
Does that even matter if it isnt?
Syncthing is very much alive.
Syncthing has been discontinued on android (but a fork exists)
‘An’ drive? I mean like 10+ drives, looking to do a master backup.
Rsync then.
I’m using Borg and it’s fine at that scale. I don’t know if it would still be viable with 100TB or whatever. The initial backup will be kind of slow but it encrypts everything, and deduplicates it too if I’m not mistaken. In any case, it deduplicates the common situation where you back up another snapshot later. Only the differences get written in the second backup. So you can save new snapshots fairly quickly and without much additional space.
