How to copy files with folder structure?

Tech Support
1

Part of my backup strategy is storing files on an external SSD located in the house of a family member that I regularly visit, with a MacBook Air, but without the (another) external SSD I use at home to store those files. This means I need to copy all files that changed since the last visit from my external SSD to my Mac (at home, before the visit) and then from the Mac to another external SSD (at the family member’s home, during the visit).

How can I easily copy all those files, including their folder structure?

Let’s say I stored two U2 singles last week:

  • /Volumes/External/MP3/U2/Singles/Elevation/Elevation.mp3
  • /Volumes/External/MP3/U2/Singles/Vertigo/vertigo.mp3

I would like to end up with this:

  • ~/Transfer/MP3/U2/Singles/Elevation/Elevation.mp3
  • ~/Transfer/MP3/U2/Singles/Elevation/Vertigo.mp3

(and not any other file/folder from /Volumes/External/MP3)

instead of:

  • ~/Transfer/Elevation.mp3
  • ~/Transfer/Vertigo.mp3

How can I do this?

2

To be honest, I’d setup a couple of new drives for Superduper or Carbon Copy Cloner. One is always at your house making daily incremental backups, and the other is at the other house.

When you’re due to visit, take the one from home and bring the one back from the other house.

Using the MBA seems like an unnecessary extra step.

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3

That might work if the original files are stored on the MacBook Air, but -as I maybe not made clear enough in my opening post- these files only exist on external SSD’s (my music collection is larger than the 256 GB SSD of my base modek MacBook Air :wink:).

PS: I also store an online copy of all those files on OneDrive, so a fallback could be this:

  • before the visit: sync external SSD 1 to OneDrive
  • during the visit: sync OneDrive to external SSD 2
  • no drives need to be swapped / travel

(I still prefer the MacBook Air as the intermediate, instead of an online service)

4

This is what rsync is for. As long as the drives are either both local, or connectable via SSH, it works fantastic. I use it for a bunch of things.

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5

Oh, indeed! Why did I not think of that? Will look into rsync!

This might help (me):

6

Although you don’t need to specify timeframes.

rsync --progress -av source destination

That makes the destination folder look just like the source. One day, one week, one year, whatever difference - it makes the two equal. “–progress” gives you a dump to your terminal about what’s actually happening.

7

That’s the thing: I don’t have enough free space on the Air to make them equal…

(and I don’t want to travel with the SSD drives)

That’s why I might experiment with “last 7 days”.

8

In that case the same command works. It’ll just do a one-way sync of anything that’s in the source that’s not in the destination.

9

I don’t think that’ll work for the preparation at home, since the source is the 2 TB external SSD drive and the destination is the 256 GB internal SSD then (and I have more than 256 GB in the folder I’d like to copy from).

Limiting to the last 7/14/… days (whatever the visit frequency might be) should work around that.

10

I don’t see how it matters whether the source data is internal or external.

11

I use Chronosync for things like this. It uses rsync in the background but provides an extensive GUI to use rather than the command line.

IMHO SuperDuper! or CCC just leave me cursing for copying other than whole drive volumes, for which they excel.

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12

No, but their size does.

13

But @geoffaire is suggesting that you back up your internal or external drive(s) to another external drive, not to the Rube Goldberg process that you propose. :slightly_smiling_face: :man_shrugging:

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14

Ah, now I see what you’re trying to do.

Depending on how portable the external SSDs are, you could also just bring the SSD to your family member’s house, plug both in to the MBA, and rsync directly.

Or a second external drive - even a cheap spinning disk style - would provide an extra copy of your data that you could update much more frequently (even daily). Then that could go with you to your family member’s house.

And of course if it were large enough, it might be able to hold multiple complete copies of your backup set. That would give you some historical versioning. :slight_smile:

15

True.

I’d rather not travel with the current SSD, because that would mean I have all local copies at one location during the visits (a goal was to have them at two different locations at all times).

Buying a third external SSD would indeed solve that, but it feels like spending money unnecessary. I have successfully used this “Rube Goldberg process” for years using a USB stick as the intermediate to copy files from the internal hard drive of my Windows desktop to an external hard drive at my family member’s house (using their PC to copy from USB stick to external hard drive), before I bought my Air. I used the PC (only) program SyncBack SE for that.

I guess I indeed misunderstood @geoffaire (or @karlnyhus did?), because I thought he suggested swapping the two drives I already have, every week (after copying files from one to the other, during a visit).

Anyway, thanks for all the suggestions everyone! I have some experimenting to do now… :smile:

16

First experiment seems to be successful (to copy from external SSD to Mac, for transfer, before visit):

pushd /Volumes/External/Media/Music/MP3
fd . --changed-within 1w -t file -0 > /tmp/files.txt
rsync -RDa0P --files-from=/tmp/files.txt . ~/Transfer/MP3
popd
17

And apparently I jinxed it by writing that here; the very first time I tried this on my Mac (instead of the PCs I have been using without issues for years) this weekend, I accidentally clicked on “Replace” instead of “Merge” and wiped almost all files on the external SSD… :person_facepalming:

Luckily an overnight Arq restore got (most of) them back (so a restore test as a positive side effect of my mistake), but I’m going to write another (“reverse”) rsync script for this part of the transfer, to reduce human error… :wink:

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