@cybrnook
I know this thread is way old, Pre-Pandemic one might say, but I'm now dealing with something similar and your approach seems like something that would be beneficial to me. Can you give me an idea of a script you would use for my situation?
Basically, I'm a photographer; I have three 2TB external drives where I store all of the photos from each photoshoot and event that I photograph. The way I have organized their directory structure is by Year, then by project, then raw files along with folder(s) broken out by the concepts of edited, Full-Res, Low-Res, Watermarked Low-Res, etc.
On each drive I have a 2022 folder, then inside that folder on one drive might be folders 2022-03-19 and 2022-07-21, then the other drive might have 2022-03-21 and 2022-05-11, and the third drive has several other 2022 project folders.
My goal is for my destination folder on the NAS to have all 2022 folders from each drive copied into a single 2022 destination folder. I have sporadically been moving one to two folders at a time from each drive into the single 2022 destination folder. What I feel is my problem now is, if I use RSYNC to move all sub folders under each external drive's 2022 folder but some of those folders are already on the NAS, how do I do it so it moves only new files and folders into the combined folder and skips over any files that are already on the nas and the latest version?
I hope this makes sense. Thanks for your willingness to read through this.