I have a few piles of hard drives from which I would like to retrieve files, which were on various machines, down through the years. Some of them were in the machines before I discarded them, some are external drives where I had backed up the machines as they were in use. I mostly backed up using Acronis True Image. I'm still using the latest version of Acronis True Image on my current machines, so I think I can restore the backup files, but my questions involve finding files that I want to keep, from all the files on the systems. I don't really care about the operating system files. I'm not trying to restore the machines, I'd just like to recover text files (source code, notes, etc.) and maybe photos or music, spreadsheets, PDFs? Anything which might be of current or historical use.

I purchased a 6TB external hard drive and am copying files from the other much smaller external hard drives on to it. I would like to process the files and remove all duplicates. I'm sure there will be tons of those.

Anyone ever tried to do this? Did you have any luck? Know of any tools to help with the process?

I'm thinking I could do a recursive directory listing of the folder with all the files in it to a file, sort it by file name and then write a program to process the files paths and find all the files of the same name and size and just keep one of the paths to each file. Then use the path to copy the files to a new folder. Does not sound too difficult (famous last words).

Hoping there is a tool which might do this. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

David Garner wrote:

I have a few piles of hard drives from which I would like to retrieve
files, which were on various machines, down through the years. Some of
them were in the machines before I discarded them, some are external
drives where I had backed up the machines as they were in use. I mostly
backed up using Acronis True Image. I'm still using the latest version
of Acronis True Image on my current machines, so I think I can restore
the backup files, but my questions involve finding files that I want to
keep, from all the files on the systems. I don't really care about the
operating system files. I'm not trying to restore the machines, I'd
just like to recover text files (source code, notes, etc.) and maybe
photos or music, spreadsheets, PDFs? Anything which might be of current
or historical use.

I purchased a 6TB external hard drive and am copying files from the
other much smaller external hard drives on to it. I would like to
process the files and remove all duplicates. I'm sure there will be
tons of those.

Anyone ever tried to do this? Did you have any luck? Know of any tools
to help with the process?

I'm thinking I could do a recursive directory listing of the folder with
all the files in it to a file, sort it by file name and then write a
program to process the files paths and find all the files of the same
name and size and just keep one of the paths to each file. Then use the
path to copy the files to a new folder. Does not sound too difficult
(famous last words).

Hoping there is a tool which might do this. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Funny you should ask. I am starting a very similar project as I want to decommission a bunch of older hard drives, many with similar content. I also purchased a couple of large hard drives to gather and store what I want to keep, but have not yet started on the migration. I am working in a Windows environment and searched for duplicate file finders that could help me at least sort out multiple copies of files. Right now I am evaluating AllDup ( http://www.alldup.info/ ). It has a portable version so no install issues if I do not like it. It seem to offer a lot of features and is worth some consideration if you are using Windows. There were others I looked at as well, bu I do not have access to the list of them right now.

Good luck,

--Ken