I used to back up on a USB external, but I downsized to laptop hard drives, which go in Thinkpad caddies I have. I started running out of room at one point, and started on a second old hard drive. Then maybe a third. Recently, I bought a 160GB that should last me the rest of my life. I put two of the three drives on the large one, and forgot one, and added to another when the big wasn't handy, etc, and lost track.
Now I'm hoping to reclaim the littler drives and sell them, or put them in other laptops.
The one thing that these tend to have in common is the folder names. I think the safest thing to do is just do a cut of each folder and paste it onto the new drive, but as I was taring my hair out over the Duplicate finder that stopped working well for me, and contemplating the cut and paste of many folders, I thought, how about something that merges folders with the exact names.
I guess the downside might be overwriting on the long-shot two files have the same name as I do the cut-paste by hand, so even if the program was that simple, I'd be happy. Also, since I use a big Thinkpad dock, I'd want the ability to merge two to a third hard drive. I wouldn't mind waiting as "Folder Merge" worked sequentially, instead of reconfiguring twice, or more. Maybe somebody has a need to merge a higher number of drives onto a single big drive.
Of course making the option to 'cut' or 'copy' from each drive would be nice, if possible.
Has anybody heard of anything that does this already?
I guess as it evolved for many drives, it would need to go on a wizard, that ran a dry run for duplicate folder names first, and then allowed exceptions, and asked to continue the merge. At first, maybe the program could just merge what the operator selected with a confirm box.
I hope this is someone's gold.
