The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Axe_zilla on 2024-10-12 02:19:55.
Greetings,
I am experiencing issues with my data and am trying to find a way to fix my shit.
To get things out of the way here's my admission : I am a bad boy. I'm dumb and I was lazy and now I'm paying the price.
I have been backing up my archive using a method that I know isn't approved, I get it. I was backing up my artwork and music/media simply by copying files to other drives. No checksums, no RAID, not ZFS, just dragging files over on MacOS and hoping for the best.
OK, that's all for the excuse as to why I'm here. Now I'm looking for a remedy before I properly set up my archives with checksums or ZFS/whatnot with healthy files that are backed up properly.
I am trying to correct for my sins as I have files that appear to be there but won't open. Some folders are there on the hard drive but when I load them into, say Adobe Lightroom, the folder doesn't even show up and I can't open them from the finder even though it says they are there and this is not happening on a dying hard drive.
I believe the remedy is to compare folders from old backups to current ones to find which files are corrupted. At the moment, I'm running Meld on Ubuntu to compare, as well as using CCC on Mac to see which one works best with the minimal amount of terminal use but I don't think I'm doing it right.
I have probably half a dozen to a dozen copies of each directory on various old drives spanning a solid decade, and I'm looking for a proven route to compare these against each other to hopefully find drives/instances that are the healthiest.
Without having anything in place like checksums or whatnot, how would you recommend I go about doing this? I don't need to check every file against each other, I believe I just need to find the healthiest drives. I think if I find the archive where the damage began, I can use the drives before that to rescue my work.
I'm running MacOS, Windows and Linux, so I'm open for any workable solution and I come to you in search of wisdom. Feel free to trash me for my errors, but hopefully I'll get some guidance as to how I should go about this.
At least let this be a lesson to anyone out there who is considering making the same mistake I made. Do it right, take the time now because to do it later will cost you much more than what it takes to plan properly.
TIA