from over_clox@lemmy.world to linux@lemmy.ml on 08 May 15:05
https://lemmy.world/post/29330629
I’ve got a whole bucket full of old hard drives, CDs and DVDs, and I’m starting the process of backing up as much as still works to a 4TB drive.
It’s gonna be a long journey and lots of files, many prone to being duplicates from some of the drives.
What sorts of software do you Linux users recommend?
I’m on Linux Mint MATE, if that matters much.
Edit: One of the programs I’m accustomed to from my Windows days is FolderMatch, which is a step above simple duplicate file scanning, it scans for duplicate or semi-duplicate folders as well and breaks down individual file differences when comparing two folders.
I see I’ve already gotten some responses, and I thank everyone in advance. I’m on a road trip right now, I’ll be checking you folks recommend software later this evening or as soon as I can anyways.
threaded - newest
Take a look into borg backup.
I have had good luck with Dupeguru
I’ve had success using Czkawka (hiccup) for deduplicating
Yea this software rules. I’ve analyzed 20TB with it.
For duplicates: Czkawka. Also, you get a gold ⭐ if you can figure out how to pronounce it 😉
Deduping only works for a single target or context at a time, so if you’re working with many drives, you’ll need to sort your data into unified locations on the backup target first, THEN run dedupe tools against it all.
Second, if all of your data from these drives fits uncompressed on the target drive, rsync will be the fastest to get the data from A to B.
Of course.
Goal #1 is to migrate what data I can (which is a fucking lot) all over to the 4TB, in separate folders for each drive. Only after that will I worry with scanning for dupes and organizing things.
I’m just looking for advice on what software is recommend for helping deal with such large tasks in advance.
I’ve actually got 2X 4TB drives plus a single 2TB drive. But yeah, I know the best and easiest way is to consolidate it all on one drive first.
Then rsync is your friend, like so
rsync -avzp /drive1/ /target2/drive1/That will copy all the files from drive1 to a destination folder in the backup drive called ‘drive1’.
Joy oh joy, I got like 75+ optical discs and like 10+ hard drives (whatever still works) to back up.
This is already gonna take months I know, just my free time at the end of the day.
This is gonna be fun. /s
Thank you and everyone for the advice though.
Side note, I think one of my drives has almost all the SNES game ROMS…
Personally, my toolkit includes Jdupes for duplication scanning and Rsync for directory merging and file transfer.
So a lot of backup solutions do deduplication on the block level, so if you use a backup software that does this, you don’t need to dedup files.
I have like 10+ hard drives and probably 75+ optical discs to back up, and across the different devices and media, the folder and file structure isn’t exactly consistent.
I already know in advance that I’m gonna have to curate this backup myself, it’s not quite as easy to just purely let backup/sync software do it all for me.
But I do need software to help.
That’s the thing: it doesn’t need to be. If your backup software or filesystem supports block-level deduplication, all matching data only gets stored once, and filenames don’t matter. The files don’t even have to 100% match. You’ll still see all your files when browsing, but the system is transparently making sure to only store stuff once.
Some examples of popular backup software that does this are Borgbackup and Restic, while filesystems that can do this include BTRFS and ZFS.
I guess you’re missing the point then. I’m backing up data coming from many different file systems, FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, EXFAT, NTFS, HPFS, EXT2, 3 and 4, ISOs (of varying degrees of copy protection plus MODE1 and MODE2 discs with audio tracks)…
Plus different date revisions of many files.
You think there’s anything consistent enough where any one solution works?
I need all the recommended software I can throw at it. Sure I’d love a purely automated solution, but i know there’s still gonna be a lot of manual curating on my part as well.
Also, files don’t have to match and filenames aren’t important? Are you a psychopath? That’s exactly what I want, to organize folder and filenames, and match and remove duplicates based on file hashes.
Either I’m massively misunderstanding why it is you want to curate your backup by hand, or you’re missing the point of block-level deduplication. Shrug, either is possible.
I get the concept of block level reduplication, no problem.
But some of these drives came from friends that reorganized their copy of files their own way, while I took my main branch they copied from and salvaged damaged files.
Ever heard of goodtools? I’ve spent an awful lot of time salvaging corrupt video game console ROMs. I have all of Atari 2600, most of NES and SNES, a number of N64 and a number of PSP games, along with a lot of other stuff.
I ain’t about to play headgames on what I have and haven’t salvaged already, I must keep track of what device stores what, what filename is what, and what dates are what.
I want an organized file/folder structure. I didn’t spend the past 20+ years to trust everything to automation.
This is precisely the headache I’m trying to save to you from: micromanaging what you store for the purpose of saving storage space. Store it all, store every version of every file on the same filesystem, or throw it into the same backup system (one that supports block-level deduplication), and you won’t be wasting any space and you get to keep your organized file structure.
Ultimately, what we’re talking about is storing files, right? And your goal is to now keep files from these old systems in some kind of unified modern system, right? Okay, then. All disks store files as blocks, and with block-level dedup, a common block of data that appears in multiple files only gets stored once, and if you have more than one copy of the file, the difference between the versions (if there is any) gets stored as a diff. The stuff you said about filenames, modified dates and what ancient filesystem it was originally stored on… sorry, none of that is relevant.
When you browse your new, consolidated collection, you’ll see all the original folders and files. If two copies of a file happen to contain all the same data, the incremental storage needed to store the second copy is ~0. If you have two copies of the same file, but one was stored by your friend and 10% of it got corrupted before the sent it back to you, storing that second copy only costs you ~10% in extra storage. If you have historical versions of a file that was modified in 1986, 1992 and 2005 that lived on a different OS each time, what it costs to store each copy is just the difference.
I must reiterate that block-level deduplication doesn’t care what files the common data resides in, if it’s on the same filesystem it gets deduplcated. This means you can store all the files you have, keep them all in their original contexts (folder structure), without wasting space storing any common parts of any files more than once.
Block level dedupe doesn’t account for random data at the end of the last block. I want a byte for byte hash level and folder comparison, with the file slack space nulled out. I also want to consolidate all related files into logically organized folders, not just a bunch of random folders titled ‘20250505 Backup Turd’
I also have numerous drives with similar folder structures, some just minimalized to fit smaller drives. I also have archives from friends, based on the original structure from like 10 years ago, but their file system structures have varied from mine over the years.
If you want to be that particular about your system, you’d be best off just writing your own.
Don’t put it past me, I already have before.
Bro is thick. He just wants to hear sorry bro, can’t be done to justify the fact that he’ll be doing this by hand, because he wants to.
Thank you, at least someone understands my stubbornness. 👍
Also, try converting Big Endian vs Little Endian ROM file formats. I spent many months doing that, via goodtools.
I’m not in any hurry to accidentally overwrite a ROM that’s been corrected for consistency in my archives because some automatic sync software might think they’re supposed to be the same file.
I’ve had great success with restic. It will handle your 4TB just fine, here’s some stats of mine:
and another one, not as large but with lots of files
Restic will automatically deduplicate your data so your duplicates won’t waste storage at your backup location.
I’ve recently learned about backrest which can serve as a restic UI if you’re not comfortable with the cli, but I haven’t used it myself.
To clean your duplicates at the source I would look into Czkawka as another lemming already suggested.
Hey, does this have a gui? I am new to linux and cant quite handle doing work like thisnwithout a gui.
I use backrest selfhostet on my server running yunohost. It is pretty much set and forget. I love it.
Do you need any of it? Usually I’ve not even thought about what might be on an old drive.
If I was worried about the slim chance there’s something of critical importance I’d need later, I’d just look over each device and pick out individual files I might want, and dump the rest.
If you’re extremely paranoid, I’d take a block-level backup of each device and archive it.
It’s not about whether I need any of the data or not. It’s about the fact that I have many archives scattered across many smaller driives of things getting deleted from the internet every day.
It’s about data preservation. And suddenly I have 2X 4TB hard drives and a 2TB hard drive? A total of 10TB, just suddenly found in a dumpster, and all the SMART stats check out?! 👍
I’m looking to backup everything I have from the past 25+ years!
Just a drop in the bucket, one of my drives has like almost all the SNES game ROMs…
If it’s just buckets of data, mergerfs can pool the drives together, and then you can dedupe the whole lot.
Or consider buying a surplus 20tb drive, copy everything to it, dedupe the 20, write back to the 4+4+2 as cold spares. Those surplus drives are $10-14 per tb and I’ve had fantastic luck with them.
These 4+4+2TB drives are fresh new to me, amazing they all seem to check out.
Right now, the drives I’ll be pulling data from range anywhere from 40GB to 320GB, from a variety of different file systems. And that’s not counting the many optical discs that need to be archived before disc rot sets in (I’m sure some have already, but looking better than I expected).
I don’t necessarily need a 20TB, just one of these 4TB drives ought to do the trick. Besides, its already gonna take me months to pull all my backups from the Internet Archive…
Sounds like you are a data hoarder haha. Can’t blame you. But for such hobby’s perhaps a ZFS system with deduplication and a second ZFS system to use for backup of the first system is what you want.
Does get costly though.
Honestly I maintain a list of file types I care about and copy those off. It’s mostly things I’ve created or specifically accumulated. Things like mp3, mkv, gcode, stl, jpeg, doc, txt, etc. Find all of those and copy them off. I also find any files over a certain size and copy them off unless they are things like library files, dlls, that sorta thing. Am I possible going to kiss something, yeah. But I’ll get most of the things I care about.
Not everything is an individual file though, a lot of the stuff needs to be stored and maintained as bulk folders.
I mod operating systems and occasionally games, plus write software. I can’t just dump off all text files into a single folder, that’ll just dump off all readme.txt files off into a single TXT folder, losing association with the project folders from which they came.
Isn’t all the code in git somewhere? I would totally do that for code projects.
I do the same thing with arduino code so I know where you’re coming from.
Not my code, I didn’t even have internet access when I started programming.
I feel you. I started coding before the internet even existed (well technically it existed, just nobody had access to it)
I’m using Borg and it’s fine at that scale. I don’t know if it would still be viable with 100TB or whatever. The initial backup will be kind of slow but it encrypts everything, and deduplicates it too if I’m not mistaken. In any case, it deduplicates the common situation where you back up another snapshot later. Only the differences get written in the second backup. So you can save new snapshots fairly quickly and without much additional space.
I don’t even want this data encrypted. Quite the opposite actually.
This is mostly the category of files getting deleted from the Internet Archive every day. I want to preserve what I got before it gets erased…
You can turn off Borg encryption but maybe what you really want is an object store (S3 style). Those exist too.
Nightly rsync job in crontab works well enough, if its an external hard drive.
If you’re going over a network, syncthing.
‘An’ drive? I mean like 10+ drives, looking to do a master backup.
Rsync then.
Please do explain then.
I have multiple drives with various differing directory trees.
I have no idea what your setup is so you’ll need to do your own research on rsync.
That’s just it, there is no setup, except Linux Mint as the main system. It’s literally a physical bucket of discs and drives in all sorts of various formats…
Isnt syncthing no longer supported?
Does that even matter if it isnt?
Syncthing is very much alive.
Syncthing has been discontinued on android (but a fork exists)
I’ve abused syncthing in some many ways migrating servers and giant data sets. It’s freaking amazing. Though it’s been a few years since I’ve used it. Can only guess how much better it’s gotten.
fdupes to find duplicate files, freefilesync to back it up.
Not recommending software. As you mentioned old hard disks, it is better to copy the files or better dd them on a ssd. That way making index and finding duplicates will be faster cause you’ve to access files once and not care about fragmentation if you dd.
That is filesystem-level. Btrfs and i think ZFS? have deduplication built in.
Btrfs gave me 150 GB on my 2 TB gaming disk that way.
There’s BeyondCompare and Meld if you want a GUI, but, if I understand this correctly,
rmlintandfdupesmight be helpful hereI’ve done similar in the past - I prefer commandline for this…
What I’d do is create a “final destination” folder on the 4TB drive and then other working folders for each hdd / cd / dvd that you’re working through
Ie
/mnt/4TB/finaldestination /mnt/4TB/source1 /mnt/4TB/source2 …
Obviously finaldestination is empty to start with so it could just be a direct copy of your first hdd - so make that the largest drive.
(I’m saying copy here, presuming you want to keep the old drives for now, just in case you accidentally delete the wrong stuff on the 4TB drive)
Maybe clean up any obvious stuff
Remove that first drive
Mount the next and copy the data to /mnt/4TB/source2
Now use
rmlintorfdupesand do a dry-run between source2 and finaldestination and get a feel whether they’re similar or not, so then you’ll know whether to just move it all to finaldestination or maybe then use the gui tools.You might completely empty /mnt4TB/source2, or it might still have something in, depends on how you feel it’s going.
Repeat for the rest, working on smaller & smaller drives, comparing with the finaldestination first and then moving the data.
Slow? Yep. Satisfying that you know there’s only 1 version there? Yep.
Then do a backup 😉
The way I’m organizing the main backups to start with is with folder names such as 20250505 Laptop Backup, 20250508 Media Backup, etc.
Eventually I plan on organizing things in bulk folders with simple straightforward names such as Movies, Music, Game ROMs, Virtual Machines, etc.
Yes, thankfully I already got all my main files, music and movies backed up. Right now I’m backing up my software, games, emulator ROMs, etc.
Hopefully that drive finishes backing up before the weather gets bad, cuz I’m definitely shutting things down when there’s lightning around…