How To Organize Multiple External Hard Drives?

With external hard drives, we can store a lot of data that will not fit into our main hard drive or data that needs to be portable. But disorganized hard drives can be a disaster and hinder the efficiency and workflow greatly.

Sometimes organizing the external hard drives can be a challenging job. Luckily, we can do it very efficiently without hiring any professional and just by following some simple steps.

Here in this article, we will go through every single step of how to organize multiple external hard drives.

How To Organize Multiple External Hard Drives

When you have multiple hard drives, you may fall into hassle if you don’t keep them organized. And there are some tips that can help you in this regard. 

Things To Know Before Starting Your Organizing Process

There is no miraculous and artificially intelligent application that can comprehend your filing and labeling conventions, generate a report, or move your files around for you. This, like any good attempt, will take some time.

Keep Your Computers Clean And Organized

First, you have to determine the types of hard drives in your inventory. It will help us organize them thoroughly. The hard drives can be USB, USB Stick, SDHC cards, spare drives, or other formats, including Windows NTFS.

After identifying the external hard drives, you have to review the individual drives and map their contents.

You can check the folder hierarchy and file types. Also, if the applications currently available are able to open these files, you can simply delete those files or look for applications that can solve your problem.

You can convert the paths to files whose names suggest importance.

1. File/folder labeling patterns
2. Storage consumed

Identifying the file contents

You can identify the file contents. Such as 

1. If the files are still relevant, you can delete them.
2. Check whether document security is necessary for some contents.
3. You can create a content manifest for each drive.
4. Finally, you can set drive labels with a legible content summary and date range.

Smart policymaking

You should create a storage policy for

1. How much storage/drives will it take to consolidate and organize your current storage mess.
2. How much storage you may need for the future growth
3. Should there be a backup policy, even for the external drive data?

Organize our data in folders using a wise hierarchy and names.

The systematic organization of data, primarily in a hierarchical manner, is known as data hierarchy. Data organization basically involves fields, records, files, and so on.

When you create any category for organizing the files, each category should have 1-2 subfolders, ideally, and at most 4-5 subfolders. The folder categories can be organized as:

1. Each folder contains a text document that outlines the contents of the folder. Due to the sequence, this file will be the first in the folder.
2. You may think it unnecessary, but without this document, you won’t recall what’s in here or why in one year.
3. You should limit the numerical value of our folders and subfolders to short, functionally descriptive names.

The naming methods:

You should name your files simply, at a glance, with a short file naming method. You can follow these simple steps to name your files properly.

1. No filenames as sentences. Long names can be troublesome.
2. Filenames with extensions. It will help you understand what file it is just by looking at the file names.
3. No illegal characters or spaces in the filenames

Retention period

A data retention policy lays out the business reasons for storing specific data as well as what to do with it when it’s time to get rid of it. When drafting a data retention policy, you must decide how to organize information so that it can be accessed and retrieved later and how to dispose of information that is no longer necessary. So basically, this means

1. What is the real-life of this data?
2. How and when to dispose of it?
3. Mark files/folders to be removed in red.

Consolidation of external hard drives

 Defragmentation is the process of locating and combining fragmented files. The Disk Defragmenter combines fragments on the disk drive into a single spot. So, if Windows is able to retrieve files more quickly, new files would be less likely to get fragmented. Here’s how you can consolidate our files.

Step 1

1.  Remove what you absolutely know is outdated and no longer needed.
2.  Folders with unsupported document types should be blue, implying potential conversion.

Step 2

1. If there are folders that need to be further consolidated on the same external hard drive, you should do that immediately. 
2. Drag and drop external drive contents to a fresh drive
3. Follow storage policy conventions.
4. Go for further consolidation where possible.

Step 3

1. Secure new consolidation drive(s)
2. Take the decision whether to recycle previous external drives
3. Clone new consolidation drive(s) for additional backup.

Step 4

• Do file conversions where possible

Backing up your valuable data

As a precaution, you should create a backup of our important data. In data management, making backups of acquired data is vital.

Human error, virus attacks, hardware failure, power outages, and natural disasters are all protected by backups. If these issues occur, backups can help save time and money. As a result, creating a backup policy is always a good idea.

You can use the following backup policies for a consistent backup.

1. Time Machine
2. Carbon Copy Cloner
3. Both
4. Other well-known policy

Or you can use the 3-2-1 rule!

Here’s what the 3-2-1 backup rule involves: 

1. Generate one primary backup and two copies of our data.
2. You have to save your backups to two different types of file media.
3. Keeping a minimum of one backup file.

Advantages And Drawbacks Of Keeping External Hard Drives Organized

Like everything in this world, organizing multiple external hard drives also has mixed blessings. Here are some advantages and drawbacks of organizing multiple external hard drives.

Benefits of organizing multiple external hard drives:

Organizing multiple hard drives can provide reliability, backup, and performance. Putting multiple drives on a single PC can also give us certain options for data security.

With multiple drives in one system, you can quickly and easily back up data from one drive to the other, creating multiple copies of vital files in case of hardware failure or user error. It also provides dedicated operating system swap or system paging file space.

Drawbacks to organizing multiple external hard drives:

The drawback to organizing multiple external hard drives is that they are honestly a pain to manage. If you run out of space, you usually wish that you had just made one big partition.

It is problematic in the case of both management overhead and expense. Also, there is always a chance of losing data due to a mistake if you are not careful enough while organizing the hard drives.

Conclusion

So now you know how to organize multiple external hard drives. The process can seem a bit tricky at first but if you give it some time, then the process will be quite easy to follow.

Despite having some drawbacks, organizing your external hard drives will increase your productivity and efficiency. Therefore, if you organize your external hard drives now, in the future, you won’t face any obstacles.