This Is How I Backup My Pictures and Videos

About 6 years ago I was moving pics out of my cellphone. When I finished, I deleted some of the folders and I moved others around. Today I still feel chills, those chills I felt when I realized I had deleted the wrong folder, and because I moved folders around I ended up overwritting hundreds of pictures that were gone for ever!

After that, I started using tools to backup my pictures, but eventually I ended up writing these scripts to do it the way I want it. So if you have a Linux box, let me show you how they work, and may be you will be spared from losing some of your precious pictures.

What You Need

• Linux, with the following installed
• Git, grep, awk, rsync, exif, jq, stat, file
• Clone this repo: bitbucket.org/jriano/backup-media

What It Does

When you set a source location, the scripts recursively search there for videos, pictures and voice recordings, and moves them into a pictures, videos and audios directories sorting them by year-month. If the files don’t have the appropriate metadata, they are stored in a no-date folder.

Configure It

In the repo there is a file named dirs-sample.json, make a copy of it and name it dirs.json. The file has the following contents:

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{
    "source": "/home/juan/Pictures",
    "picsdestination": "/media/juan/T2/Family-Pictures",
    "vidsdestination": "/media/juan/T2/Family-Videos",
    "audiosdestination": "/media/juan/T2/Family-Audios",
    "prime": "/media/juan/T2/Prime-Pictures"
}

Edit the files to match your folder structure.

source is the single place where you dump your media to be sorted. The following 3 directories are the destinations for each kind of media. prime is still not used, I intend this to be a location for your best pictures.

Run the Script

./backup_media.sh

The script will move the files to the new locations. The final result should be something like this:

juan@laptop:/media/juan/t2/family-pictures$ ls | head
2005-01
2005-02
2005-03
2005-04
2005-05
2005-06
2005-07
2005-09
2005-12
2006-02

That’s All Folks!

You may run into some file types not being recognized, if that’s the case let me know. Also, don’t worry about overwritting, as the script compares with md5 and rename files if two have the same name and are not the same file.