Syncing hard drives together and bringing missing tracks over

I might be in the wrong section here but perhaps someone. Hold move this post to a better section iif I have.

I’ve got 4 x 2tb hard drives and each are about 60% full of tunes. About 2 years ago mostly the drives were all the same as each other, had the same tracks on, but over the last couple years I’ve added some new songs to one or two of the drives but not drives 3&4 or I’ve added song to drive 4 and not the others etc.

Is there some simple and either free or cheap software which would make all the drives the same, without making thousands of duplicate files. Something that works to the idea that it makes a note of all the tracks on each drive, sees what’s on drives 1 2 and 3 and adds any tracks that those drives have got, that drive 4 is missing, onto drive four, then does it for each drive - I want to end up with 4 drives that are identical to each other and crammed with every tune that was on any of the drives

Any suggestions? I don’t mind paying ypto about 40 or 50 pounds (dollars or euro) for the right software

Or can windows 10 do this already without duplicating lots and lots of files ? I’ve ever only used drag and drop in Windows and never any command line / DOS commands

Well, you said Windows, in which case my old go-to is Beyond Compare (https://www.scootersoftware.com/features.php). You can tell it to compare to disks or folders and it will then tell you what is what on which side. I found it intuitive and easy to use. Clearly there are a lot of syncing tools around, some free. The free ones usually have limitations, like being able to only sync 500 or so files in one go. Beyond Compare is 30 dollars for the Standard Edition which should be fine for what you have in mind.

So if you want all 4 the same, start with syncing 1 and 2, then 1 and 3, then 1 and 4. 1 and 4 should now have ALL tracks on it, Now do the 1 and 2 and 1 and 3 once more and done.

Hope that helps. Just my 2 cents worth.

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For Mac users

  1. Super Duper
  2. Carbon Copy Cloner

Carbon Copy Cloner is my favourite

I do all my downloads to one drive and when I plug in my other back ups it just copies just the recentfiles or files that i have updated recently e.g. if I play a song in Serato or edit tags

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