Is it possible to make an Daily Updated Compressed backup of a 3.6tb hard drive to a 180gb ssd?

[BodaciousYT]

Hi, So a  few months ago my external hard drive suffered a mechanical failure and died causing me to lose 2 terabytes of downloaded anime ,manga ,visual novels, movies, tv shows, and projects and companies that do the in depth repairs quote around 700$ and I just don't have that much to spare unfortunately. I recently built a new computer and I want to make sure I don't get caught lackin' so I was wondering if there is any existing program or software to make an Daily Updated Compressed backup of a 3.6tb hard drive to a 180gb ssd. The reason I need the compression is due to the drive size but if it's not possible to do this is there any way to create a daily backup of all the file and folder names.

[Electronics Wizardy]

You really want the backup drive to be bigger than the drive that is being backed up. While compression can help save space, your files are already compressed in their video format, so compressing again won't make the files any smaller.

 

If you feel like doing it the way to complicated way, you could store a heavily compressed version of the movies and tv shows on the ssd, but the quality will be much lower, and encoding 4tb of videos will take a long time.

 

If you want a good backups, id get something like a 8tb external hdd. You can get them pretty cheap, and much easier than any other solution.

[tkitch]

just the file and folder names?  That's easy.

 

You can create a scheduled task that runs a simple batch file:

 

Command:  Dir F:\*.* /s /a | H:\DriveIndex-%Date%.txt

 

(Maybe it would need to be power shell?  I haven't tested it, but this should be about right for the command.)

[Eigenvektor]

1 hour ago, BodaciousYT said:

3.6tb hard drive to a 180gb ssd.

A (lossless) compression factor of 20:1 is completely unrealistic. You can achieve that with movies and audio, if you're willing to sacrifice quality, but not e.g. for most other file types. On average, don't expect more than 2:1 for a mix of different file types. As was said above, you can't compress files that are already compressed, which would be the case for most media files like anime etc. At least not without re-encoding them with much worse quality (which would also take a lot of time).

 

On top of that, if you want daily backups, you ideally want delta-backups that only back up things that are new or modified to (actually) save some space. If you're compressing files, that would take an enormous amount of time, because the backup software would have to decompress each file to compare it to determine whether it was modified and needs to be backed up again.

 

I'd simply get a large HDD to serve as a backup. Better yet, get two, to create two independent backups. If your drive dies, your backup is the only copy until you can get a replacement. If it dies in the meantime everything is gone again.