Consolidating backups
I wrote about a fictional backup tool a while ago that would crawl through all your hard disks, figure out which files are already adequately replicated, and replicate the rest into temporary directories so as to ensure that you could always recover from the loss of a disk or two. I'm finally getting this up and running: I have a script that builds a file containing a hash of every file on all the disks in a machine, and another that walks through all these files and works out where things are. Currently all it does is tell me the aggregate size of all unique files, as the first thing I want to do with it is make a single global backup of all my stuff onto an appropriately large hard disk. I'm pretty confident I have less than a terabyte of stuff, but it might be even less than that, given that I have multiple old backups of my laptop hard disk, and so on.