ElevenFingers
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- May 30, 2008
- Messages
- 187
Over the past two decades I've taken on the task of backing up data from family devices as they we're rotated out or were showing signs of failure. My, my parents and my sister's data mostly. They are all as close to computer illiterate as modern knowledge workers can be.
I was not very elegant with my methods: I would copy entire drives, user directories and other folders that in all likelihood contained copies of data I already had. What's worse is I rarely took time to name and sort files. If I did, I have since forgotten the methods toy madness.
Now I want to sort and make the data available to its owners without infringing on their privacy or having to manually sort the data. I wrote a simple python script to sort and rename Images by their metadata which has resulted in 70000 images sorted by date and camera model (proxy for person who took the photo), but I don't think the same approach would work for other file types.
My question is this: is there a magic bullet tool to help at the very least identify duplicates across folders and help me with creating a single copy of cleaned and organized data (not perfect, but usable)? If not, how would you tackle this?
My idea is to either use WeTransfer or a physical drive to give them their data so I am no longer its custodian.
I was not very elegant with my methods: I would copy entire drives, user directories and other folders that in all likelihood contained copies of data I already had. What's worse is I rarely took time to name and sort files. If I did, I have since forgotten the methods toy madness.
Now I want to sort and make the data available to its owners without infringing on their privacy or having to manually sort the data. I wrote a simple python script to sort and rename Images by their metadata which has resulted in 70000 images sorted by date and camera model (proxy for person who took the photo), but I don't think the same approach would work for other file types.
My question is this: is there a magic bullet tool to help at the very least identify duplicates across folders and help me with creating a single copy of cleaned and organized data (not perfect, but usable)? If not, how would you tackle this?
My idea is to either use WeTransfer or a physical drive to give them their data so I am no longer its custodian.