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.
I’ve had great success with restic. It will handle your 4TB just fine, here’s some stats of mine:
Total File Count: 78374 Total Size: 13.324 TiBand another one, not as large but with lots of files
Total File Count: 1295210 Total Size: 2.717 TiBRestic will automatically deduplicate your data so your duplicates won’t waste storage at your backup location.
I’ve recently learned about backrest which can serve as a restic UI if you’re not comfortable with the cli, but I haven’t used it myself.
To clean your duplicates at the source I would look into Czkawka as another lemming already suggested.
I use backrest selfhostet on my server running yunohost. It is pretty much set and forget. I love it.
Hey, does this have a gui? I am new to linux and cant quite handle doing work like thisnwithout a gui.
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.
I’ve had success using Czkawka (hiccup) for deduplicating
Yea this software rules. I’ve analyzed 20TB with it.
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.
Please do explain then.
I have multiple drives with various differing directory trees.
I have no idea what your setup is so you’ll need to do your own research on rsync.
That’s just it, there is no setup, except Linux Mint as the main system. It’s literally a physical bucket of discs and drives in all sorts of various formats…
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.
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.
I don’t even want this data encrypted. Quite the opposite actually.
This is mostly the category of files getting deleted from the Internet Archive every day. I want to preserve what I got before it gets erased…
You can turn off Borg encryption but maybe what you really want is an object store (S3 style). Those exist too.
I have had good luck with Dupeguru
Honestly I maintain a list of file types I care about and copy those off. It’s mostly things I’ve created or specifically accumulated. Things like mp3, mkv, gcode, stl, jpeg, doc, txt, etc. Find all of those and copy them off. I also find any files over a certain size and copy them off unless they are things like library files, dlls, that sorta thing. Am I possible going to kiss something, yeah. But I’ll get most of the things I care about.
Not everything is an individual file though, a lot of the stuff needs to be stored and maintained as bulk folders.
I mod operating systems and occasionally games, plus write software. I can’t just dump off all text files into a single folder, that’ll just dump off all readme.txt files off into a single TXT folder, losing association with the project folders from which they came.
Isn’t all the code in git somewhere? I would totally do that for code projects.
I do the same thing with arduino code so I know where you’re coming from.
Not my code, I didn’t even have internet access when I started programming.
I feel you. I started coding before the internet even existed (well technically it existed, just nobody had access to it)
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.
Deduping only works for a single target or context at a time, so if you’re working with many drives, you’ll need to sort your data into unified locations on the backup target first, THEN run dedupe tools against it all.
Second, if all of your data from these drives fits uncompressed on the target drive, rsync will be the fastest to get the data from A to B.
Of course.
Goal #1 is to migrate what data I can (which is a fucking lot) all over to the 4TB, in separate folders for each drive. Only after that will I worry with scanning for dupes and organizing things.
I’m just looking for advice on what software is recommend for helping deal with such large tasks in advance.
I’ve actually got 2X 4TB drives plus a single 2TB drive. But yeah, I know the best and easiest way is to consolidate it all on one drive first.
Then rsync is your friend, like so
rsync -avzp /drive1/ /target2/drive1/That will copy all the files from drive1 to a destination folder in the backup drive called ‘drive1’.
Joy oh joy, I got like 75+ optical discs and like 10+ hard drives (whatever still works) to back up.
This is already gonna take months I know, just my free time at the end of the day.
This is gonna be fun. /s
Thank you and everyone for the advice though.
Side note, I think one of my drives has almost all the SNES game ROMS…
