Advanced synchronization

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johngalt
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Advanced synchronization

Post by johngalt »

Hi, all,

Long time that I have not had to post in here because, well everything has been working flawlessly through all my testing in Windows 10 Insider Preview builds. X2 is still my go to for all things file related.

I have a question, and it requires a bit of an explanation.

I've taken my Mother's laptop and her external backup drive with me after the holidays to clear things up - she has a 750 GB HD in the laptop and a 2 TB backup drive, and both are inexplicably full, to the point where Windows is refusing to work correctly. naturally, I thought that I would be able to easily fix all of this by simply slaving both drives to my desktop and using X2 to start moving folders around for organization and consolidation.

Thing is, though, that she had multiple copies of lots of things - to the tune of well over 1500K (yes, 1500000) files - and not just a single copy - I'm talking up to 12 copies. She has a bad habit of dragging and dropping her files from her laptop to her backup drive, but never drops them in the same place - so she has, for example, the following folder structure on the backup drive:

H:\Mom\Documents\Pictures\Pictures\Pictures

Each of those folders has the relevant files in them - the top level Pictures has folders and files, and so doe the second level, and the final level....and this is in a single folder. She also has structures such as

H:\Mom\Documents\Mom\MomX, where X ϵ {1,2,3,4,5} - and more of the same files and folders (but not exact duplicates of files / folders) as are found in H:\Mom\Documents\.

Then, it gets worse - because I also find the similar folders in a Pictures folder, and documents under the Picture folder, and then lots of other subfolders that have *copies* of files located elsewhere....

It's haranguing me to death, it is!

My suspicion is that she has continually made drag and drop copies, but forgets where she previously copied files and doe it again to a new, random location, and on top of that she has, at different times, also tried to remove files from her laptop, so there is no telling which set of folders is the master anymore. And all of this copying and moving has caused an additional problem - a lot of the files are the same content but have varying dates - in which case I don't want the newest files, but the oldest (and this holds especially true for most of her multimedia files, which date back to 10 years for the vast majority, with some files as old as 15(!) years old).

So I'm currently using the robust move function to move stuff around, but I've noticed that if I select yes/no to all it doesn't only move forward for the type of conflict it found (say, older files with the same exact content) but for all conflicts (including newer, identical, etc.)

I tried to play with the synchronize function, but wasn't sure what it was showing me (other than unique files, that I understood).

My desire is this: an easy way to move files from one folder to another, automatically overwriting if they are same content but *older*, ignoring if they are identical and / or same content but newer, and prompting me if the content is different.

I figure the Anoraks here will have a nifty solution for this. Even if it is a 3rd party app.....
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nikos
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Re: Advanced synchronization

Post by nikos »

I can't think how xplorer2 can do this kind of confirmations for you
have you looked into the duplicate checker function though? you can put in various criteria and there are lots of blog articles explaining:

www.zabkat.com/blog/12Dec10-duplicates-finder.htm
www.zabkat.com/blog/more-duplicates.htm
www.zabkat.com/blog/delete-duplicate-files.htm
www.zabkat.com/blog/super-easy-duplicates.htm
www.zabkat.com/blog/find-duplicates-quickly.htm
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johngalt
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Re: Advanced synchronization

Post by johngalt »

I had only found two of those links - thanks for the others - I'll work my way through those.

Cheers!
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