make some more room on MacBook Air by getting rid of some files

[lipwak]

I have a 500 gb MacBook Air that I need to make some room on. I have a La Cie 4 tb drive that is always connected to it. I have been using FreeFileSync weekly to keep it up to date for about a year. (I also use Time Machine on a different drive to do daily backups.) The La Cie also has all of the music, docs, pics and movie files from previous computers on it, about 3.5 gb worth, about 27 years worth of stuff on it.

A couple of months ago, to make some room on the MB Air I moved all the movies off it and I am happy with how that went. I did that manually, visually checking to be sure everything was moved over. It’s too hard to check to see if all of my other file types from the MB Air are on the La Cie. (File sizes of folders don’t match, item counts don’t match. I just have to assume that in the past year of syncing, all of my movies were copied over (before I had deleted them from the MB Air) so I assume everything else has been as well.

These are my settings now:

Screenshot 2023-05-09 at 2.58.55 PM.jpg (58.53 KiB) Viewed 848 times

I am happy that my settings seem to be correct. I’m not getting duplicates and everything was being copied over. New files got added. Old files remained untouched unless a newer version of it had been brought over. Old versions of updated files get thrown out.

I do get errors when I sync. I ignore them. They seem to be about files that have different characteristics and don’t seem to be that many of them. All my movies were being kept up to date on the La Cie before I moved them so I assume that I am backing everything up but I really don’t know.

To make some room on my MB Air, I now want to move another category of file type (documents, music or pictures) over to the La Cie as well.

How can I be sure that all of my files for whatever category of file type I end up choosing will already be on that La Cie? Can I trust that my current setup has brought everything over? I will delete that category right after doing a sync of everything.

How would you go about this?

Thanks.

[Plerry]

In the FFS GUI, first check in the Exclude Filter (F7) that you have not excluded any files that you want to be part of the sync. Then run just a Compare (no sync), and then check the results, particularly by making the result category "left and right are equal" visible (by toggling the "="-icon mid below the Compare results.

[lipwak]

Interesting, thanks!

[therube]

(

The La Cie also has all of the music, docs, pics and movie files from previous computers on it ...  about 27 years worth of stuff on it.


Just saying, you don't want to leave yourself open to a single point of failure.
So backup, elsewhere, too.
)

[lipwak]

Yep. The La Cie I am have attached gets backed up as well. And I have a NAS that has backups on it too but they aren't current as it is so slow it isn't worth backing up to.