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.

  • doeknius_gloek@discuss.tchncs.de
    19·
    23 hours ago

    I’ve had great success with restic. It will handle your 4TB just fine, here’s some stats of mine:

    Total File Count: 78374
Total Size: 13.324 TiB

    and another one, not as large but with lots of files

    Total File Count: 1295210
Total Size: 2.717 TiB

    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.

    • Ekpu@lemmy.world
      2·
      10 hours ago

      I use backrest selfhostet on my server running yunohost. It is pretty much set and forget. I love it.

    • Squizzy@lemmy.world
      1·
      15 hours ago

      Hey, does this have a gui? I am new to linux and cant quite handle doing work like thisnwithout a gui.