Easiest way to sync two HDDs with differences.

I have two HDDs that I store my photos on but only find myself saving to one of them at a time and then later trying to find the new content to move over to the second one. I also sometimes find myself bored and edit old photos from the one HDD and save it to that HDD. In that case, the one HDD has the original and edited copies while the second HDD only has the original files. Is there an easy way to plug both HDDs in and have the second one sync to the first one with any differences?

Windows or Mac?
For Mac I use Carbon Copy Cloner

Mac. Free program? Safe?

It's free for 30days. I've been using the paid version for years. Works great. But it is easy to do some google searches to find the top options if you want to see your options.

losangelino wrote in post #17706661
It's free for 30days. I've been using the paid version for years. Works great. But it is easy to do some google searches to find the top options if you want to see your options.

Will give it a go. Thank you!

Worked flawlessly! Thank you!

I organize my photos in folders starting with the date. This is the simplest.

But say you go back later are process something or change it.

Just go to "detailed listed view" and add 'sort by date modified" to find the recently edited files.

Hope that helps after your 30 days are up.

This workflow sounds like a recipe for disaster. Save your images to one drive, put the other in an external enclosure and keep it backed up offsite.

Mirrors are not backup, corrupt the main or delete something by mistake before you realise you've lost your backups. Use a proper backup program. Windows backup software reviews for photographers.

Also, RAID is not a backup.

I use a program called syncback on windows. Since I use a mac machine, its installed on VMWare Windows - almost the only reason I have windows loaded

I use the rsync command in Terminal to sync two hard drives. It's free and already part of OS X. You can even setup Automator to run the rsync command daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
http://www.practically​efficient.com …011/03/18/rsync​-automator

I went through the link and it seems to cover the scenario of creating a backup of a disk on an external disk.

The issue that I have with this would be if changes could be made in either the source or the destination and you want to have the latest copy. And apart from modify date, I could also end up with incremental files in either disk.

While this may be for anther topic.... But helpful.
I recently learned and used Dupeguru on Mac
Took 7 minutes to scan my external drive's 19,000 photos.


I keep very organized care of my .CR2 raw files, but I had over 200 duplicates by titling two folders with the wrong month, inside larger folder set.
Ex: In my 2014 folder, I had Novemeber 6th 2014 and October 6th 2014
Exact same set of photos because November 6th set should not exist.


While this is not relevant to an automatic copy.
It could be extremely useful if you worry about over-copying data from one drive to another, or you tend to just copy and paste folders and files to an external drive haphazardly like my father tends to.
"Better to back it up than not". ....good luck finding a thing though dad.

Hope that helps someone.

kram wrote in post #17786905
I use a program called syncback on windows. Since I use a mac machine, its installed on VMWare Windows - almost the only reason I have windows loaded

syncback is awesome. very configurable. since my raids are large, they need to be split into multiple external drives for offsite backups, and syncback works great for it.

my only complaint is that the way it displays your single and group backup names makes it hard to see which one is which at a glance. i have to triple check before clicking the go button to make sure i'm not backing up the wrong set or to the wrong drive.

...also, OP, as others have noted: you do indeed have a recipe for disaster. do not make changes to both drives. change one, and backup to another. i think it's inevitable that the backup program will make a mistake and overwrite the wrong copy. or you make the mistake of changing the same file on both drives--which version should the program take?

Why not use a mirror program with a 5 TB drive? Alot cheaper just 2 drives

I'll say it one more time. Mirrors are not a backup, RAID is not a backup. Do things properly if you want an actual backup.