Which Programs Fit This Bill? (backup 'book-keeping')

For a few weeks I've been consistently building up a huge backup of my most important data (10's of GB's of music made by myself and others; 10's of GB's of images & photo's from over the years, Photoshop Projects, custom VST presets etc etc). So far I've backed up all of the above onto 128GB USB sticks (because SSD's are still sold at ripoff prices as far as I'm concerned). However, SINCE then, I've probably made atleast 20 more tracks, and also downloaded as many. The same goes for new photo's, new synth presets, new drawings etc etc. How do I keep track of all of this!!?!?!?

I need to be able to examine a directory/folder structure, and see ONLY the most recent additions to that folder and ALL of its sub-folders (the files in sub-folders need to be labelled as being in "X" subfolder, so I know where they are), then cross-reference that to the relevant backup folder. The reason is because my music folder for example, is well over 20GB, and the folder itself is split into sub-folders by genre (Dub & Reggae, House & Garage, Chillout & Beats, Jungle, Ableton Tracks etc), and each of these folders contains hundreds of tracks, so trying to 'update' or 'append' the music-backup directory would be virtually impossible (unless I had 20+ hours to spare and a 100% flawless memory! I have neither...).

Is there a small, free, no-BS program out there that can handle this? Arranging folders by 'date modified' just doesn't cut it, and the same goes for Win7's file search function. I need an actual program that looks at my BASE folder, then compares it to my BACKUP folder and says "hold on mate, theres 3 files in your BASE folder that haven't been added to your BACKUP folder, you better back em up guv!". I've used DupeGuru for similar purposes, but it would be the opposite of ideal in this situation. Reason being: Scanning a 3GB folder for dupes can take forever, so imagine how long it'll take for a 20GB folder (OMFG NOOOO! See you in another life!).


Thanks.

 

I think what I should've done (to make things less confusing for myself) is: instead of adding any new music to the music folder directly, I should've created a new 'Temp Music' folder, where I put everything that hasn't been backed up yet, then move it to the 'true music folder' once I have.

I did a similar thing with my pictures folder (but for a diff reason I can't remember!) because every pic I've downloaded or ripped off my cam since I got Win7 has been put into a seperate folder (and the old My Pictures folder still exists) which will make it REALLY easy to know what does and what doesn't need backing up.

 

sorry if this is a tad late. if i understand what you are trying to do, what you need is a backup program that will exactly mirror your base folder to the backup folder. syncbackfree from 2brightsparks will do exactly that
http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/
in the program, you designate the source folder, the destination folder, and select mirror left to right. you can then do a preview. syncback will then scan the source base folder, then scan the destination backup folder, and show you the differences it has found and the action it will take. you can then scan through the results window and verify everything is as it should be. i've been using both the free and paid versions of syncback for at least a decade now, on both home computers and work computers. and it has always performed flawlessly. whether it is pictures or music, my downloaded files, or my 14000 different emails accounts that i have in thunderbird, it will fairly quickly, look through and scan hundreds of thousands of my files [ in excess of hundreds of gigabytes ] and exactly mirror my rather complex system of folder structure. also, when i get the urge to reorganize my source folder, where i rename folders and regroup other folders into new ones and general cleanup as the years go by, i just rerun syncback and my backup destination folder will be changed to exactly mirror all of the changes i just made to my source folder.
hope this helps, good luck with it!