I could use advise on which syncing software to use for a Mac and two external hard drives.
Scenario:
- I have one external hard drive as my primary "hoard" drive to which I actively add large files (1+ GB), move files to different folders, change file tags, etc.
- I have a second external hard drive that I use as my first-level disaster recovery in case my primary drive fails. The second drive is currently one-way synced to the primary hard drive using a rysnc script i wrote.
- I don't need to store changes or previous file versions. Just want to mirror one drive to another.
While rsync gets the job done, it doesn't handle the above efficiently because any changes are seen as new files, which means it's constantly writing/re-writing large files to the secondary hard drive.
- If I change the name of a directory including 100+ GB of files, rather than just similarly rename the directory of the secondary hard drive, rsync will delete all of the files, create a new directory, and re-sync all of those files.
- If I rename a file, rysnc will delete the file and then rewrite it.
- If I add a MacOS file tag to the file, rysnc will delete the file and then rewrite it.
Thus, if I make any directory changes or tags, rsync can take hours (even days) to re-sync. I can imagine that's not healthy on either drive.
It would be great if MacOS had a native function that said "if I do anything to Drive A, do the same thing to Drive B", but I haven't found it if it exists. Thus, I'm looking at other options (Chronosync, Carbon Copy Cloner, etc.) that might be a better solution for my use case.
Open for all suggestions or feedback.