Harddrive cloning - snapshot software - advice?

theguzman

I have around two dozen various external harddrives mainly salvaged from old Sky boxes and IT repair jobs over the last few years. I would say it contains 8-10TB of films and TV series downloaded before I got proper broadband where streaming became an option.

What I am looking for if someone can advise is a piece of software to virtually map these drives. I have only one USB Dock and what I would like to do is plonk in the drive, take a snapshot of what's onboard, then rinse and repeat. The I could virtually search my various drive for what I want and I know that e.g. Superman 1080p is one Harddrive number 12 etc.

I'm not talking about cloning the data just merely making a virtual copy snapshot for easy indexing and searching.

smuggler.ie

Just for list of directories/files see CMD or powershell options - you can export list to CSV's

Might be, setting up Plex server, allowing to build database from each disk, could work - not sure how it would work on long run when disk is not connected for extended period of time.

If avail, set file server to cover whole storage capacity and use Plex or similar to manage your media.

Just last weekend migrated my Plex server storage from HP p400@Raid0 to HP P812@Raid6. Not much of data(~4TB) and not even sure that i need resilience on that media, just experimenting....

theguzman

I found this piece of software after which does exactly what I want.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vvvapp/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS_H8ReA3yc

I have now to just rename the harddrives with stickers and scan them into this software and it will make finding files and movies much easier and less time consuming.

smuggler.ie

Handy.