After generating and collecting data (in form of pictures, videos, e-books, audio-books, and documents) for more than a decade I realized that all my digital data was spread between my work laptop, home laptop, a 128 GB external disk drive, and a 1TB external backup drive. To make matters worse I had multiple copies of hundreds of pictures and videos. My 1 TB backup drive had backup directories like “Backup1”, “BackupMay2011”. I even found a “Backup” directory within another “Backup” directory. In short I was in middle of a personal data management nightmare. This is when I decided to set my house data in order.

First I had to consolidate all my pictures, videos, e-books, music, and documents in one place. I decided to use a 128 GB partition of my laptop as the “single source of truth” for all my data. I planned to import/copy data from all my existing sources to this 128 GB partition – D:\

Consolidating documents was easy as there were hardly any duplicates. Music was easy too, as I have a fairly small collection of songs that are well organized. Now I had D:\Documents and D:\Music with my documents and music respectively.

Pictures made up most of my duplicate files. Enter LightRoom. LightRoom’s import dialog has “Don’t import suspected duplicates” option that does a great job in filtering duplicates! I downloaded a trial version of LightRoom (Good Guy Adobe lets you use it for free, for a month). I created a D:\Pictures folder and few sub-folders based on years i.e. D:\Pictures\2005, D:\Pictures\2006, D:\Pictures\2007 … all the way up to D:\Pictures\2012. Using LightRoom (and keeping “Don’t import suspected duplicates” option selected) I imported all pictures from my existing sources (work laptop, home laptop, external drives) to these folders within D:\Pictures. LightRoom also lets you change the file name during import. I chose the format “yymmdd-hhmmss”, as a result I could quickly verify if all the files had been imported within the correct sub-directory.

Process for videos is same as that for pictures. I created D:\Videos folder and imported all my videos from different sources using LightRoom, keeping the “Don’t import suspected duplicates” option selected. Yes, LightRoom detects duplicate videos too!

Now it was the turn of e-books. I was using Calibre, but was not aware that Calibre also does a great job in consolidating books. I created a D:\Books folder and imported books from various sources using “Add books from directories, including sub-directories (one book per directory …)” option available under “Add Books” menu item. Within few minutes all my books had consolidated within my D:\Books directory.

Now that all my data was available at one location without any duplication my next step was to backup my “single source of truth” partition. I decide to have 2 backups. My “FirstBackup” (weekly backup) would be on my 128 GB external hard disk and my “SecondBackup” (monthly backup) would be on my 1 TB external hard disk. “FirstBackup” will be taken on every Friday and “SecondBackup” will be taken on the last Friday of the month.

For backup I decided to use Unison which is an excellent synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. Unison has vast number of options and Philip Guo’s Unison Guide helped me put together few scripts for backing up my data partition. My backup scripts consists of 2 files: backup.prf (Unison’s preference file) and backup.bat to quickly invoke Unison from command line.

backup.prf (Note: my external drive maps to E:)

root = D:\

root = E:\ auto = true



# Helps out a lot on Windows

fastcheck = true



# place new files at the top of the list

sortnewfirst = true



ignore = Name Thumbs.db

ignore = Name *~

ignore = Name *.tmp

ignore = Name *RECYCLE.BIN*

ignore = Name *System*

backup.bat (Available in system path)