Drive organisation solution needed!

[lkilsbysteele]

Hi,

 

I am a videographer and currently use external SSDS for old file storage. But due to my poor data management, they are a mess. I will eventually move to a NAS, but for now, I have an organisational issue.

 

My data is essentially randomly distributed across approximately 10 drives, with no discernible order. The folder has some form of structure, but not a lot of it. What I would like to do (or something similar) is have the drives in chronological order, meaning I can simply keep them on a shelf, and when I need to access old client data, I know where to look. I was wondering if there's a disk utility that can examine all the data and then reorganise it in a more efficient order across all the drives?  

 

Happy to take suggestions on everything!

 

Liam 

[porina]

I'd suggest moving to big HD storage now so you have all of it in one place, and don't be lazy and sort it out yourself^*. Get two, so you have a backup in case you don't already. I'm personally not sure about SSDs for long term data storage and it'll be more expensive vs HD anyway.

 

Even if you don't go NAS right away, you can still use HDs directly connected to your system.

 

^*Says the person with tens of TB of video and photos that is only vaguely sorted. At least they're in the same place!

[lkilsbysteele]

I think it will all be on a big hard drive in the next week or so, but still looking for software that could map and organise that drive 

 

[AWatson]

46 minutes ago, lkilsbysteele said:

I think it will all be on a big hard drive in the next week or so, but still looking for software that could map and organise that drive 

 

I came on to ask a very similar question.

 

Would you just get a normal internal hard drive with a decent capacity for this kind of thing?

 

I have a bunch of files spread across multiple historic hard drives, external and internal HDS etc. A mix of work and personal stuff.

 

Aside from the file structure being a mess, my issue is that I sometimes have duplicate data on different drives, e.g. more recent versions of the same file. 

 

I'd like to move stuff onto one "big HD", and as part of that process, do a general cleanup identifying my duplicate files and giving me the option to keep both files or just the most recent file.

 

I can probably code this myself (compile lists of files from every external HD including file paths and time stamps, write a filter to pick out duplicate files from those lists as part of the process and order them by time and date, but check these manually so I can choose which ones I retain, then use rsync to copy the filtered lists of files to the big HD, and reorganise the files in place). But I don't want to reinvent the wheel if there is already something that would be ideal for this. 

 

Once my data is organised, I plan on either building a NAS using leftover components from upgrades of my computer, or just sell those components and use Backblaze to have some kind of cloud backup (I don't think I need short-term instant access to backups beyond the big HD, so Backblaze is probably fine in the short term).