So here’s the problem that I have, I have several generations of back ups, which are currently taking over huge amounts of space on my NAS server. I want to be able to go through and process all of the files that are on it while the duplicating, and possibly going through and tagging any files that I find that are helpful. Is anyone aware of a good tool to help accomplish this task. Again because of the nature of the backups, I don’t want to utilize any software I’m not running locally.
Thanks in advance.
The only thing I can think of is to do a restore of all the backups in sequence, assuming they’re all of the same thing. That would give you one consolidated image. Then you could run some deduplication and take a new single backup, if desired.
But really it’s so subjective that I don’t think there’s really any way to automate it. I would mount all the backups, go through everything, pick out what you want to keep, and delete the rest.
Look at it this way. If you’ve had the backup for years, and never needed to restore any of those files, how likely are you ever need them in the future? Even if you did delete something you later wanted, how life-threatening would it be to not have it?
Or you could take the easy way out and just add more storage.