Workflow for moved folders

[rob_gendreau]

I have a bunch of photos to back up. Some exist on my boot drive, a SSD. Some are on a HDD attached as an external drive. I back them up via SD to a network drive.

The problem is that as the SSD fills I move the photo folders to the HDD. SD seems these as new, and copies them, even though it already has copies from the SSD.

I'm wondering how best to deal with this, and still have a least a semi automated script.

Any suggestions?

[dnanian]

You'd have to have them all match perfectly, Rob... which a Finder copy generally doesn't. You can try using "Paste Exactly" (in Edit), which MIGHT help.

[rob_gendreau]

Yeah....

I suppose a better strategy would be to backup folder by folder. So instead of backing up SSD/Pictures and HHD/Pictures, I should separately back up the folders therein, which are in YYYY-MO format. Then, I can Finder move SSD/Pictures/2013-12 to HDD, but NOT add it to the list of "copy" files in the script, since it was already in the "copy" script when it was on the SSD, and is already in the sparsebundle, although in a different spot. I guess SD would just report it as missing or figure it was deleted. But it would still be there. And I wouldn't need to add anything to the list of files I've already copied from the HDD.

Or am I missing something? I think my error was just including the parent folder instead of each month's folder.

[dnanian]

That doesn't seem wise.

Remember - the idea is that the backup is a duplicate of the source, with files in the same location, in the same folders. If you don't copy things from the backup, everything is going to get messed up next time - the files will get deleted, most likely.

[rob_gendreau]

So, no way to sort of concatenate photo folders on the target sparse bundle, since they come from two different volumes?

I thought of using a target for scripts for both source volumes that had the same name, since I could have a folder called "pictures" on both source volumes, and one "pictures" on the target sparse bundle, but this seemed like it would create chaos.

I suppose the safest route is to just let SD delete the folder from SSD/Pictures and write a "new" one to HDD/Pictures, even though they're the same.

And just ignore the inefficiency. And as you note, it would make it a bit easier to restore, although that isn't much of a problem with archived photos since Lightroom takes care of the organization, so they can be all over the place.

Thanks,
Rob

[dnanian]

You can "concatenate" if all the folders have the same names, there are no potential naming conflicts within the folders, and you use Copy Newer or Copy Different...