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.
Do you need any of it? Usually I’ve not even thought about what might be on an old drive.
If I was worried about the slim chance there’s something of critical importance I’d need later, I’d just look over each device and pick out individual files I might want, and dump the rest.
If you’re extremely paranoid, I’d take a block-level backup of each device and archive it.
It’s not about whether I need any of the data or not. It’s about the fact that I have many archives scattered across many smaller driives of things getting deleted from the internet every day.
It’s about data preservation. And suddenly I have 2X 4TB hard drives and a 2TB hard drive? A total of 10TB, just suddenly found in a dumpster, and all the SMART stats check out?! 👍
I’m looking to backup everything I have from the past 25+ years!
Just a drop in the bucket, one of my drives has like almost all the SNES game ROMs…
If it’s just buckets of data, mergerfs can pool the drives together, and then you can dedupe the whole lot.
Or consider buying a surplus 20tb drive, copy everything to it, dedupe the 20, write back to the 4+4+2 as cold spares. Those surplus drives are $10-14 per tb and I’ve had fantastic luck with them.
These 4+4+2TB drives are fresh new to me, amazing they all seem to check out.
Right now, the drives I’ll be pulling data from range anywhere from 40GB to 320GB, from a variety of different file systems. And that’s not counting the many optical discs that need to be archived before disc rot sets in (I’m sure some have already, but looking better than I expected).
I don’t necessarily need a 20TB, just one of these 4TB drives ought to do the trick. Besides, its already gonna take me months to pull all my backups from the Internet Archive…
Sounds like you are a data hoarder haha. Can’t blame you. But for such hobby’s perhaps a ZFS system with deduplication and a second ZFS system to use for backup of the first system is what you want.
Does get costly though.