I'm looking for strategies, tools / software and tips to make my long journey of organizing these backups easier. Main questions at the bottom for a TLDR.
About the content:
- ~3tb total, 15 laptop backups, 12 phone backups
- there will be overlap / duplicates in content between backups
- backups contain folders I manually dragged onto the portable drive. I never plan to do a full restore of a backup.
- backups may contain photos, videos, downloads, photo editing files, code and projects I wrote, a lot of junk I'd like to scrap
Hardware:
- A recent MacBook Pro
- empty Samsung T9 4TB SSD, ~2000MB/s
- WD 2.5" passport HDD 5TB, ~110MB/s
- A second HDD with a copy of the above for redundancy
Plan:
- first bring everything on the HDD to the SSD since the SSD is way faster
- sort through everything. I need help with this part
- move the organized backup back to the HDD since SSD's aren't suitable for cold storage
- implement a plan for the 3 2 1 backup method
Questions:
- software or tools to sort, organize, de-dupe, delete through everything on the drive. Free or paid
- tips for how to search through everything instead of going folder by folder? I'm guessing software can help here.
- output folder structure suggestions? Should I just flatten all backups to one? Let's say, all photos I took with my phone from all the backups to one folder? Or is that a bad idea