Back up from four external Firewire drives

[Guest]

I am hoping to solve a problem created by doing disorganized back ups to four external Firewire hard drives (all 250GB drives)). Many of the files on the four drives are duplicates, some identical, other identical except in file size. Most of the files are digital photographs, ranging from 200kb to 250MB in size (I am a working professional photographer). Can Retrospect be used to sift through the four hard drives and copy just one version (for example, the very largest one) of every file to a new (fifth) drive, in order to create one master set of files? We are Apple Mac based, running both OS9 and OSX (Tiger). Thanks in advance!

[waltr]

hi h,

 

Quote:

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I am hoping to solve a problem created by doing disorganized back ups to four external Firewire hard drives...Many of the files on the four drives are duplicates, some identical, other identical except in file size

 

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are you sure you aren't doing duplicates here? it doesn't sound like your files are in a Retrospect format, but are rather raw on the external drives. can you clear this up before a solution is offered? sorry, but your post is a bit confusing.

[Guest]

Thanks for the response and sorry if I was not clear. The photographic files on the four external hard drives are either Photoshop files, TIFF files, or JPEGs. The same photographic file may exist in both the TIFF and JPEG format, and may also exist in a couple different TIFF file sizes and the JPEG. Yes, there are duplicates of some of the files, sometimes even multiple copies of the same file. My goal is to create one master file of each photographic file on the new, 5th, hard drive. Then I could clean off each of the four hard drives and implement some kind of organized system for keeping track of the photo files. These files have accumulated over a period of several years, I simply would like to organize them and thought Retrospect might be useful in doing so.

[waltr]

hi h,

 

ok, i see what you are saying. unfortunately, i don't think Retrospect is going to help you sort this out. it's possible that you could duplicate each of the four disks to the fifth, but i'm taking it that the duplicate files exist in many different directories so you'd end up with _everything_ (or very nearly everything) on that fifth drive. you couldn't use selectors, because you can't be sure which files are duplicated.

 

honestly, the only thing i think that could help you here would be some kind of perl or python script that used regular expressions or something. i don't know of any comercial software that would do this for you, but you may want to browse http://www.versiontracker.com .

[Guest]

OK, thanks very much for the insight. I am familiar with VersionTracker so will take a look. Cheers.

[CallMeDave]

You might be successful by backing each of the four drives to a Backup Set (stored on a sixth drive) and then doing a Restore to the fifth drive. The Backup would match idenetical files, even in differing locations, so it would not backup the same file more then once.

 

But the Restore would have to be done without Snapshots (which keep track of the multiple instances of files). So either do the Backups with Snapshots disabled, or do the Restore using the Search method.

 

I've never tried this, and you'd want to do some testing first to makes sure it works as you want.

 

Dave