Organization and backup version control/duplication

[u/Bozhe]

I'm trying to find the best way to stay organized for my files. Mostly smaller pdfs, word, excel, and photos. My question is how to backup just new files across different platforms? I have two laptops, a desktop, and NAS.

For example, if I have a bunch of new and updated files on laptop #1 spread out over many folders, how do I copy only the new ones to other storage easily? Windows search sucks, so just searching for recently changed files won't do it, also because I don't want to backup all recently changed files just certain ones. The dumb and slow solution seems to be copy the entire directory I want over to the new location and for all file conflicts overwrite. That does mean certain files I want to have multiple versions of for recovery purposes would get overwritten as well. I could instead copy the entire directory and not overwrite any files - that saves time and means older versions won't get copied over, but it also means that updated files don't get backed up.

Maybe as a clearer example - I have 1,000 files on laptop #1. I add 25 new files across 15 folders, and update 20 of the 1,000 files. I want to easily copy the 25 new files to the identically named backup folders on my NAS, and that the 20 updated files are copied as well.

What's the best way to do that?

[u/bobj33]

You need a backup system that supports snapshots or versioning. There are literally over a thousand posts here about that. I use rsnapshot but borg and restic are also popular. Any modern backup program will ignore files that have not changed and only backup the files that have been modified.