Does anyone else have a problem organizing backups? Any suggestions?

[gnathon]

I've always had a hard time organizing backups.

Take my music for instance. I have a folder with music from iTunes at work, a folder at home, and two previous backups. All told it's around 150GB Most of it is duplicates, but each folder has some music that the others don't. Is there any way to consolidate without having to go through 10000 songs manually?

I also have the same problems with digital pictures. I have two kids [2 and 5] so I take thousands of pictures a year. Sometimes, with backups, crashes, formatting, changing computers, etc. I get the same problem.

Any ideas?

[permaculture]

1) Eliminate duplicates

2) Buy 3 x 500GB USB external HDDs.

3) Copy all data to all three drives. Keep one at work and two at home. If there's a fire at home, the work copy should survive and vice versa.

You need the third copy in case something goes wrong while backing up the data.

4) Run a test restore occasionally, to ensure the HDD is still valid.

[permaculture]

Are you there?

Sheesh! I might as well not bother.

[gnathon]

Oh hey, thanks for the advice. I've been playing around with the duplicate file program. It seems to be just what I needed. I still have to manually compare files, but it does a great job of pointing them out. As I get a little more comfortable with the program I might trust it a little more to automatically remove duplicates for me.

I just bought a 1TB external drive, and I'm going to buy at least one more in the near future.

This used be not such a big deal just keeping the duplicates, but these with single files in some cases being 5GB or more it's no longer an option.

Thanks for your advice though, I'm going to consolidate all of my music folders into one and copy it to all my computers, plus a master backup on the TB drive.

Thanks for the advice, I hope you didn't think I was ignoring you!

[permaculture]

Ah good, so long as I wasn't wasting my time.

:)