cliffes

Hi. I'm on day 1 of my DrivePool trial, and just trying to work out how I might attack it. I have a 1TB laptop plus a selection of external hard drives that I've grown over the years of trying to back up a sizeable image database. My DSLR generates big image files - about 40 per GB - so lots of images, plus print files and backups builds up quick. In addition to the laptop I've got one each of 10, 8 and 4 TB external drives, and two each of 1, 2 and 3TB drives. The total of 35TB may seem like a lot, but when you've got partial and often overlapping backups on different drives, it's amazing how fast you run out. There's still quite a few TB of free space - but it's spread across all of the above, and I was wondering how I could safely backup the essential files and delete unecessary duplications and backups. One option was to buy a couple of those nice shiny 10TB drives you see around the place, but rather cheaper (if it works) and less wasteful of my existing resources is DrivePooling the current free space; moving 'important' files & folders into it; and deleting backups as they become redundant so as to free up even more drive space. So far I pooled one 1TB drive and have a shiny new I: drive with 1/2TB free. My 10TB drive is all backup files, so in theory I could delete all of them, zoom my pool storage up to 10.5TB and start to "duplicate"(?) the huge 'mypictures' folder in the pooled drive. Does that sound like a reasonable way forward? Or am I heading for disaster? Sorry for the length of this, and thanks if you managed to get this far. Any comments or suggestions very gratefully received!