So I have a problem. I have WAY too many hard drives and backups from decades of computing. I just hoard everything. The issue is now I don’t know what I have duplicates of and what I don’t. or when I want to format an old external drive for something else, I’m not sure if I actually have a backup of it.
I just want a way to basically compare folders and see what files are missing or what are duplicates. I’m fine with CLI but I may prefer a GUI for this so I’m not deleting files by accident as easily…
I have searched around for this question but all the solutions seem way too complex for me.
I’m sure someone else has a better method, but I’d just use whatever file manager you have to consolidate everything into one folder and let the file system flag any dupes.
Have ten movie folders on a bunch of different drives? Pick the biggest one, attempt to move the next biggest one into it, ignore all dupes, repeat.
Again, though, there’s probably a better way
This would be my solution as well but I know there must be better ways !
You could rsync everything into one pile, recursively walking through all directories. You’d need a way to smush duplicate files with different names, but also to catch the opposite case of different files with the same name.