HELP - Backing Up Several Large HDDs to Many Smaller HDDs

smg669 · 20 Nov 2015

I have a small media server. It's a bunch of drives in a full size tower PC, each formatted individually (i.e. no RAID - NTFS). Right now it's 6 drives, either 4TB or 3TB.

I have a bunch of smaller (1.5TB and 2TB) drives that I'm not using and would like to use to have a backup of the files spread across the 6 larger drives.

Anyone have a good idea of how to do this? Ideally I would like a solution like in the good old CD/DVD backup days where you can tell a backup app to back the whole lot onto CDs and it will span across however many DVDs you need. But for hard drives. It will copy all it can to the first hard drive until it's full, then it will ask me to mount a new hard drive and it will pick up where it left off. Nobody seems to make such a program.

Alternately I can just back up as much as I can to each drive and then pick up where I left off on the next backup drive. But how do I figure out in Windows 7 how many folders I can copy before I try to copy too much for the target drive? Is there a backup utility for Windows like the OS X app Carbon Copy Cloner that tallies the selected backup folders prior to copying them?

Thanks for any advice or thoughts...

S

Golden · 20 Nov 2015

There is no easy 1-click option to do this.

One possibility is to setup the smaller disks as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) if the BIOS allows that, and the JBOB is sufficiently large to cater for your needs.

An alternative is write a .bat to use robocopy to copy selected data to a selected spare disk. You will, however, need calculate capacity beforehand.