I am on a data archival kick these days. I kept all of the drives, SD cards, etc. from every device I’ve owned since as long as I can remember. The collection is large enough that it’s time to consolidate it.
Some context:
- A few years ago, after my mom passed, I got all of our family photos (thousands). I bought a Epson FastFoto FF-640 to scan all of the photos, front and back. It worked like a charm.
- 1 IDE hard drive, a smattering of (Mini-)SATA hard drives, and a handfull of (Micro|Mini) SD cards.
- The devices stored data for many different operating systems: Windows, Linux, Mac, pre-iPhone Cell Phones, Random Digital Cameras
- Years ago, I copied all of this data to a 1TB disk that has since become corrupt that also had its own data on it.
My goals are simple:
- Move the data to a newer set of disks
- Safely dispose of the unnecessary hard drives
- Index the photos in a meaningful way
Tools:
- SATA cables
- IDE cables
- SD Card Reader
- Rosewill SATA/IDE to USB Adapter. These aren’t made anymore by Rosewill, but there’s probably others available.
My new disk is a Toshiba 4TB Canvio Flex Portable External Hard Drive. I laid it out like this:
tree -d -L 1 .
.
├── Family Photos
├── Time Machine Photos
├── Time Machine 2022-07-02
├── Time Machine 2023-06-18
└── WD320G9512
...
Where each data source has its own file. I also made a META file under a few of the sources to record some details about the source disk, just for fun. Things like manufacturer, original disk size, approximate date, etc… once I got that started, it was just a matter of copying files… lots and lots of copying files.
Process:
- Connect each of the old data sources to my Thinkpad T480 via USB
- Connect my new disk the same way
- rsync -av –whole-file –progress /source /dest
- Wait until rsync is complete
- Repeat