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.

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    16 hours ago

    There’s BeyondCompare and Meld if you want a GUI, but, if I understand this correctly, rmlint and fdupes might be helpful here

    I’ve done similar in the past - I prefer commandline for this…

    What I’d do is create a “final destination” folder on the 4TB drive and then other working folders for each hdd / cd / dvd that you’re working through

    Ie

    /mnt/4TB/finaldestination /mnt/4TB/source1 /mnt/4TB/source2 …

    Obviously finaldestination is empty to start with so it could just be a direct copy of your first hdd - so make that the largest drive.

    (I’m saying copy here, presuming you want to keep the old drives for now, just in case you accidentally delete the wrong stuff on the 4TB drive)

    Maybe clean up any obvious stuff

    Remove that first drive

    Mount the next and copy the data to /mnt/4TB/source2

    Now use rmlint or fdupes and do a dry-run between source2 and finaldestination and get a feel whether they’re similar or not, so then you’ll know whether to just move it all to finaldestination or maybe then use the gui tools.

    You might completely empty /mnt4TB/source2, or it might still have something in, depends on how you feel it’s going.

    Repeat for the rest, working on smaller & smaller drives, comparing with the finaldestination first and then moving the data.

    Slow? Yep. Satisfying that you know there’s only 1 version there? Yep.

    Then do a backup 😉

    • over_clox@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      4 hours ago

      The way I’m organizing the main backups to start with is with folder names such as 20250505 Laptop Backup, 20250508 Media Backup, etc.

      Eventually I plan on organizing things in bulk folders with simple straightforward names such as Movies, Music, Game ROMs, Virtual Machines, etc.

      Yes, thankfully I already got all my main files, music and movies backed up. Right now I’m backing up my software, games, emulator ROMs, etc.

      Hopefully that drive finishes backing up before the weather gets bad, cuz I’m definitely shutting things down when there’s lightning around…