It's Tidy Tuesday again!
First, welcome to the new subscribers who have joined this post in the last few days. January often motivates people to think about organization, including digital organization. I'm glad to have you along for the ride!
I just returned from a whirlwind trip to visit my parents for a few days. Together, we performed (among other things) a pretty massive tech upgrade for my dad's flight simulation setup. His computer is now modernized by a decade or so and capable of running even the latest flight sim software with ease. But you know what that means...there's now another layer of old drives and archived data to deal with.
As it turned out, his old computer had FOUR drives in it, two of which were themselves largely full of multi-layered backups and archives. So much data! It felt very much like the exact situation I'm also working on for my consistency challenge for the first quarter of 2025.
Speaking of that, here's how I fared this past week:
- Week: Q1/2025, Week 3
- Files deleted: 0 (0 GB)
- Files triaged: 0
Yes, dear readers, I made no progress on my data organization this past week. Sometimes that happens, and all you can do is try again next week. C'est la vie. But I have a good reason! What I worked on with my parents was very similar to my own project, and I got to use a helpful technique that I wanted to tell you about now.
I can't spend a lot of time and attention on my parents' data now, but I wanted to leave things at least a little more centralized and organized than what we started with. We opted to deploy a Synology NAS as part of the tech upgrade to provide a permanent home for important data, and it made an ideal place to collect all the files from all of their old drives. In other words, the NAS became the data triage location. (All the data might sit in an early stage of triage for quite some time, but that's okay—it wasn't doing more than that before, and now it's easier to work with.)
Now, moving data from one drive to another using your operating system's built-in file management tools—Windows and File Explorer, in this case—can be a painless process if everything goes smoothly. But if there's an error at some point, those tools often lack the features to help you diagnose and resolve them efficiently. Logging specific failures for later review, resuming from the middle of a transfer, retrying only failed files, and other corner or failure cases can be quite frustrating indeed.
So what tool is better? Why, one dedicated to file syncing, of course!
Thinking About Syncing
(This heading and the subject of this email were inspired by a brilliantly funny ad from Berlitz, which you should absolutely take 45 seconds to watch right now.)
We often think about file syncing as something that happens across multiple devices, like your computer and your friend's, your phone and your PC, or maybe your desktop and your laptop. But you can also sync files between two drives in the same computer, or even between two locations on the same drive!
Because I didn't know what hiccups I might encounter, I opted to use a free, open-source application called FreeFileSync. It's free, open-source, fully cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux), well-liked across the internet, and pretty simple to use:
You have many options and a lot of control over the syncing process, but you don't need to dig into them for many common uses. The main option to be aware of is the synchronization type, which controls what actually happens when you run the sync task:
- Two-way: changes on either the source or destination will be made on the other side (additions, modifications, and deletions)
- Mirror: the destination will be made exactly like the source, even if that means deleting files that were already on the destination
- Update: additions or modifications on the source will be copied to the destination, but files deleted from the source will remain on the destination if they were there before
In my case, I used the mirror synchronization mode, because I wanted a complete backup of each drive into a clean destination. (Fun fact: since the original sources were not changing and the destination started out empty, all three options could have worked for what I wanted. But mirror is still the most correct option.)
After choosing the sync type, all I needed to do was define the source (just the "root folder," a.k.a. top level, of each drive) and the destination (a new drive-specific subfolder on the aptly named "Backup" share on the Synology NAS device), then just click the Synchronize button.
And wait. Lots of waiting. Lots and lots of waiting. There were about 2 TB (that's 2000 GB) of data across those four drives, so it took a while. But that's okay, because we could still use the computer for other things in the meantime.
As it turned out, there were a number of small issues that I ran into during the file syncing process. Only one out of the four drives had no hiccups whatsoever, while the rest had a number (and sometimes a very large number) of files that couldn't be accessed. FreeFileSync logged all of them for me to look over afterwards, but copied everything else perfectly.
Even more importantly, after I corrected some of the problems causing the copy failures in the first place, FreeFileSync let me re-run the same sync task without any duplicated work: all of the files that had already been copied were simply skipped over, so the second run-through took minutes (or even seconds) instead of hours.
As you can see, a good file-syncing app is an excellent tool to have in your collection.
FreeFileSync isn't the only option, either. You can read an article comparing various popular sync tools here, or peruse a rather technical but very detailed comparison table here. If you want a more ongoing, permanent synchronization tool, you can also look at Syncthing or use one of the well-known cloud services like DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, or iCloud--all of which perform similar functions with a cloud server in between. But for all they do, those services aren't ideal for the kind of one-time drive-to-drive backup that I did last week.
Finally, before I wrap up, a helpful subscriber whom I know and trust recommended another Mac-specific alternative to the WizTree filesystem visualization tool I wrote about last week. His favorite for this purpose is DaisyDisk, a sleek and modern app that takes a slightly different visual approach but accomplishes the same goal:
It costs $10 (one time, not a subscription), and a free trial is available, so check it out if you're a Mac user who wants a really nice disk usage visualization tool.
For now, keep syncing about--I mean THINKING about--something you want to work on consistently to improve your digital life, or keep working towards it if you've already chosen your goal. Happy data-taming!