Looking to consolidate some 10yr old random drives to one big new drive. Also, keep a couple drives I’m currently using synced with this big drive. Seems like a merge mess waiting to happen since some of the folders are similarly named on different drives etc.
1 Maybe I should just dump each individual drive to its own top level folder in the big drive and then go through the pain of manually merging everything? Open to suggestions.
2 Once this is done, what’s good on the Mac to keep the two current drives in sync with the bigger one?
Having had this issue in the past, I went to dumping the drives into separate subfolders in one top level folder named “Archival”. I’ve made no attempt to merge them into a single hierarchy – search in Finder has always quickly located anything I wanted.
Not quite sure your objective with the syncing the drives you are currently using. I’m just guessing this is part of your backup strategy and not a plan to keep all your data on one giant drive (nothing wrong with that as long as it is in turn backed up). I do clone backups, which are generally best to a drive the same size, or at least a partitioned drive with a partition the same size. For syncing file structures between drives I use Chronosync with a scheduled sync configured. In this case it is between systems and not to an external drive, and I use ChronoAgent on the remote system. Chronosync gives one a crazy amount of control over the process. Perfect for a Mac Power User!
I think you are right to just go top level folder onto the drive and use finder. I have some real OCD with file structure, but it took me so long to collect that and I’ll resist the urge to completely consolidate. Will look into those. Thanks!
