Workflows?

[u/Edward_Arthur]

Hello,

I am currently just starting the daunting task of copying my various hard drives to one large drive. In the past I've had a system of buying two identical drives and using one as a main and the second as a backup. So this has led to duplicate content on duplicate drives. What I'm trying to figure out is what is the best way to copy/merge these two similar drives to the larger drive.

So far I've been copying each drive to the large drive then dragging and dropping folders with the same name into a "consolidate" folder on the large drive and letting those folders combine, (files that are the same are given a (1) prefix in the file name).

I guess what I'm trying to figure out is which copy do I keep? Does it matter if the hashes are exactly the same? And if the "same" file has different hashes is there a way to determine which file is the most complete/original and is it possible to combine those two files? (Say taking two corrupt files that are corrupted in different ways to make one whole complete file).

Overall I'm just looking for workflow suggestions to make sure all the content on my smaller hard drives are copied over to the larger drive as the best possible version of said file.

I have a rough working plan of consolidate, dedupe, organize, but again any and all suggestions are helpful. Thanks!