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Combining backups from different external hard drives! How?

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Hi Community!

I would like to get your help on this one:

I have several WD external hard drives (one 2TB and two or three 1TB (rather old) to which I backed up files from my laptop and cleaned up.

I finally got a 10TB My Book and over night, I did a full backup from my overflowing 2.5 TB laptop.

Now, I really, REALLY want to consolidate, without duplication the data from my other drives, which weren't done via Acronis, just regular file transfer.

How can I do this? 

Thanks all! 

1 Users found this helpful

Udor, welcome to these public User Forums.

I finally got a 10TB My Book and over night, I did a full backup from my overflowing 2.5 TB laptop.

Now, I really, REALLY want to consolidate, without duplication the data from my other drives, which weren't done via Acronis, just regular file transfer.

You are going to need to use a utility such as the integrated Windows RoboCopy tool, or else a third-party synchronisation tool to copy your data from the older, smaller drives to your new 10TB one.

RoboCopy is a command line type tool and will take a little bit of learning about how to use it.

There are various free and commercial / paid synchronisation programs available that would allow you to use a more friendly graphical interface for selecting & copying data.

One free tool that I have used is called SyncFolders which is reasonably easy to use. 
Note: you will need to connect at least one of your old drives along with your new drive to perform this type of synchronisation.

Thank you Steve!

I have both drives already connected, both are of course USB3.

I will look into the SyncFolders tool for certain.

The WD Book comes with backup tools etc. would those have that feature as well?

 

The WD Book comes with backup tools etc. would those have that feature as well?

Sorry, I haven't used any of the WD tools supplied with their drives so cannot advise on that.

I doubt the WD backup tool does copy/sync, but I also do not know.

Basically, if they are both connected, I would go for robocopy.  It's fairly straight forward, but make sure the SOURCE is first and the DESTINATION is next.  If you get that backward, you will not be happy with the results.

Here's a n example, where we assume D: is the source and E: is the new destination and you want to make an exact copy of the particular folder on the SOURCE (D:) to the DESTINATION (E:)

right-click CMD (command prompt) and run as adminstrator to launch it (do this even if logged in as admin)

robocopy.exe "D:\folder1" "E:\folder1" /MIR /R:0 /W:0   (of course, change the folder name as needed - and I'd recommend you start with 1 folder at a time, to confirm this meets your needs.  You can do an entire drive, but sometimes, breaking things into manageable smaller chunks can be a better.

This should make an exact copy.

FYI... only do this with pure data.  If you have your user profile moved there and plan to move that, let me know first.  You want to exclude some default "junction" folders because Windows already uses junctions for things like My Documents, My Music, etc. that will keep-looping if you don't exclude them.  The data will copy over, but you don't want a never-ending recursive loop.