How To Merge Identically-named Directories With Many Identically-named Files…

…so that the most recently-modified copy of each file is the one that’s retained?

Somehow Microsoft OneDrive royally screwed up the data on my hard drive.

Now some of my data is current, and some is so old that I no longer had copies of it on my hard drive, even in the Recycle Bin. So it shouldn’t have been in the cloud with OneDrive, either. Yet somehow, it’s now back on my hard drive, replacing up-to-date versions of these files.

But luckily, I had also backed up my data onto an external drive. But the most recent backup was over a week ago.

So some of the data on my (internal) hard drive is newer than what’s on the external drive, and some is older.

So how do I copy the data from the external drive back onto my internal drive in such a way that only the most recently-modified copy of each file is retained?

In an automatic way, that is, not by manually comparing each pair of identically-named files?

BTW, restoring missing files from OneDrive’s cloud Recycle Bin won’t work. As viewed on MY computer, at least, every page on their site keeps rapidly and endlessly reloading itself, and hence is entirely unresponsive.

Any ideas?

 

My suggestion is to leave them on the external. I save very little on the internal drives. You can access them just as easily. If the hard drive fails you just replace the drive and you still have your files. If it's something I have to keep I put it on a CD.

 

Well, regardless of where the data resides, I just want a single, merged, collated data set.

And the reason I want to put it on an internal drive is because SATA cable is so much faster than USB.

But it would be on a DIFFERENT internal drive than my OS and apps. They'd be on a SMALLER internal drive, and my user data would be on a LARGER one.

You can get a small (500 GB) internal drive for $25. So you can buy a couple extra, then backup an image of your system drive onto an external device, then restore that image to each of those couple extra small drives, and keep them for spares.

Then even if your system drive melts down completely, you don't even have to restore its image, just swap out the small system drive for another one that's already all set to go.

 

Apologies.

Windows 10 Pro
Version 1703
Build 15063.877

Thanks for the link. Yeah, Win10 sucks in a lot of ways, but security is paramount, and Win7 is no longer supported. I’ll just have to suck it up and go with xcopy.

 

I think I understand now.TeraCopy is much better

 

Thanks for the tip; I’ll check it out.

I hadn’t realized there was extended support for Win7. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

But because I’m so concerned with security, I think I’ll stay with Win10.

Speaking of which, I just updated it, so my current version and build is now:

Windows 10 Pro
Version 1709 (Fall Creators Update)
Build 16299.125

But truth be told, my problem is now resolved.

What happened was this: I had installed Office 365, which comes with 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage. And I was told that I could therefore just delete my OneDrive +50 subscription.

But evidently I was told that in error, because when I did so, it caused a lot of my data to be deleted — now only from the cloud, but from my own hard drive as well. And the deleted data was no longer in the Recycle Bin on my hard drive, either.

But it WAS still in my OneDrive Recycle Bin in the cloud. But the webpage to retrieve it simply wouldn’t work.

But when I accessed it via Edge, rather than IE, it worked fine, so I just restored all the data. So, problem solved.

Thanks again to both of you.

 

I'd suggest http://freefilesync.sourceforge.net/ or if you want the 'best' shareware program for that job I'd say http://www.foldermatch.com/ - I use foldermatch - very easy to use and understand the comparison & has filters to show matches or orphan files, whatever you want. Also there is Beyond Compare http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/beyond_compare.html