There are two steps to what I'm trying to achieve.
I am trying to make an external hard drive back on my laptop hard drive that ONLY syncs folders so that I can subsequently add files to the laptop drive and then perform routine one-way syncs to the hard drive.
I'm doing this because I don't have any space on my laptop hard drive but I don't want to keep dumping files that need to be synced to my external hard drive to an unorganised folder on my laptop.
(1)
so let's say I have a folder on an external hard drive called "important". that folder has 300 folders that each contain tons of GB's of files. I would like to initially set up a placeholder/proxy folder also called "important" on my laptop with all the 300 folders without the files. I should only set this up once.
(2)
then in that placeholder/proxy "important" folder on the laptop, i'll drop the files I want to sync into their appropriate folders and then perform monthly two-way syncs that only syncs folders and one-way syncs the files to the hard drive...always leaving just the folders on the laptop and but always one way syncing the files.
Does anyone know how I can achieve this?
Only sync folders (setup) then two way sync folders and one way sync files (monthly)
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If your laptop is always the source of your data, where you will create and (after syncing to your backup) delete, and you might incidentally restore items from your backup to your laptop, you can simply create whatever folder structure on your laptop, and run an Update-variant sync to create your backup. This will copy any existing folders, subfolders and files in the source location to the target location, maintaining the folder structure.
Because you run the Update sync-variant, any files and folders existing in the target location, but not or no longer existing in the source location, will remain intact.
So, you can delete files within the FFS source location on your laptop, and they will remain on your backup.
You can leave the folders folder structure on you laptop intact; this hardly consumes disc space.
If you also remove (empty) folders on your laptop, you need to add those later manually again, or as part of a restore from backup. I don't think only re-creating/syncing a folder structure (without files) is possible with FFS.
There are however other tools that can, see e.g. here or search for "Copying Directory Structures without Files".
In neither case does a FFS two-way sync seem to make sense.
Because you run the Update sync-variant, any files and folders existing in the target location, but not or no longer existing in the source location, will remain intact.
So, you can delete files within the FFS source location on your laptop, and they will remain on your backup.
You can leave the folders folder structure on you laptop intact; this hardly consumes disc space.
If you also remove (empty) folders on your laptop, you need to add those later manually again, or as part of a restore from backup. I don't think only re-creating/syncing a folder structure (without files) is possible with FFS.
There are however other tools that can, see e.g. here or search for "Copying Directory Structures without Files".
In neither case does a FFS two-way sync seem to make sense.
