How to re-sync my primary and backup hard drive.

elsmandino

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I keep all my most important files (photos, camcorder video etc.) on my NAS, in a folder called backup.

I have a backup hard drive in my desktop computer, with a single folder also called backup.

In an ideal world, the backup folder would be an identical replica but over time, they are now pretty different because I was too lazy to backup with hardware (paying the price now :().

What I used to do was put new photos on the NAS but then just dump copies in the backup harddrive, without putting them in exactly the same place.

Sometimes, I might have also put double copies of things on one hard drive, but not the other.

Essentially, therefore, I have two folders that need to be exactly the same - I have two folders that contain different files, have different folder structures and each have differing sets of duplicates.

I have no idea, how to sort this out - any advice would be much appreciated.

My initial idea was copy everything from the backup folder to the NAS folder (at least I would know that the NAS would have at least one copy of everything).

I should then sort out the NAS folder (with duplicate finder software) and proper folders and then sync the newly sorted folder to a new hard drive - a lot of work, but is that the only way?
 
Cant say I have any ideas on how to clean up the duplicates other than doing it the hard way with some help from dup photo finder software.

For keeping the NAS and PC HDD in sync what you could do is use something akin to Onedrive but for your NAS, if you have a Synology one for instance you can use Synology Drive to mirror in real time a folder the NAS and on the PC, if you delete something from the PC it's deleted from the NAS & vice versa.

That way whether you dump files onto the PC HDD or NAS share they stay the same as does any organization efforts. If you don't have a Synology NAS some of the other big name NAS brands have similar features.
 
I looked before doing this a couple of years ago and didn't find exactly the tool I was looking for (something to find duplicate folder structures at different places in the hierarchy).

I seem to remember mostly using a combination of Winmerge's folder compare and just doing it by hand.

For keeping the NAS and PC HDD in sync what you could do is use something akin to Onedrive but for your NAS, if you have a Synology one for instance you can use Synology Drive to mirror in real time a folder the NAS and on the PC, if you delete something from the PC it's deleted from the NAS & vice versa.

He's calling it a backup folder though, so he likely doesn't want it synced in that sense, just consistently organised so everything is backed up and the latest version can be easily copied back in the even of a loss.
 

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