I work at a small company without an IT person, and have been tasked with migrating our existing network folders to a new NAS while at the same time restructuring the folders to make more sense. I am therefore looking for suggestions on how best to approach this and not miss anything.
Folder structure will all change but I want to make sure the files all find a new home. I will do this as a manual drag-copy on a file by file basis, re-categorizing the files as they copy, then at the end of all the copying I want to be able to run something that will look for all the files on the old volume and then look on the new volume to make sure that file exists there regardless of path. I was thinking of file-duplicate finding software like CloneSpy for this task as I believe that app can ignore path to find dupes of files, and in theory it should find a duplicate of every file.
One big caveat to all this though is that I have to do this while people are still working on the network files, and it is going to take me a few weeks to go through and copy everything to a new location, so somehow I need to synchronize the version from the network onto the new location on the NAS, but most syncronization software is not file specific but path specific. Any thoughts on how to accomplish detecting any changed file since the file-moving process started, and then copy it to the new NAS in the new location?
I have considered an approach where the new folders are made on the NAS but the files are not copied, instead they are scripted to copy to the new location, then people keep working on the files and after I have mapped where each file needs to move to in the script, I click "go" and that evening everything copies over to the new NAS and the next day everyone starts working off the NAS versions and not the network versions. However, I am not aware of a user-friendly file management tool that will let me set up this file-move-mapping over time and then do the move in bulk when ready, any suggestions there are welcome. With that approach I could then do the duplicate file check the day after the move to catch any files that do not have duplicates, as they might have been created without me knowing while I was doing the file-move-mapping. Don't know if this is all possible though.