Advice please - Huge task of consolidating files

[allat39]

Hi guys

Advice please on METHOD (to start with). I've huge job ahead of consolidating data on several hard drives, and I am looking for the best method to use Vice Versa Pro.

INFORMATION
I have seven IDE/SATA 'Source' hard drives (each being mounted as one at a time as Drive S) equal about 3Tb in total data (including duplications of files)
My 'main Target' hard drive is Drive D' and it has 1.5Tb of free Data space
My '2014 backup Target' drive is Drive X which is an external USB hard drive(s) accessible as Drive U) or a NAS unit via Ethernet.
They have about 2Tb free space
I have the neccessary leads and connections.

AIM
I want to get to a point where I can securely erase the old source hard drives, (I may keep the newer ones) ... but aim to keep one copy of the data on my hard drive (Drive D) and one copy on the backup external drive X with no errors.
Because of the duplications, my belief is that I will gradually be able to de-dupe them visually after some sort of comparison.

ISSUES
There are many duplications of family photos, and different versions of the same documents scattered across the drives.
i.e. some photos have the same name but may be a lower resolution version of the same photo from a high resolution original source folder, or may be sized differently.

These files may or may not appear in the same folder name.
example: Drive 1 c:/photos/2011/Greece and Drive 2 in C:/photos and movies/Family/Holidays/2009
or
example: Drive 1 c:/my documents/software/purchases and Drive 2 c:/Do not lose/OFFICE/Microsoft 2007

Some photos and documents appear to have gone from the last couple of drives but may be present on earlier drives, so I dont want to lose them


SUMMARY

So what advice please?

I had in mind starting by trying somehow to keep the folder names and put everything . on my 2Tb Data Hard drive.
e.g. D:\ARCHIVE\Photos and Videos\Family\2009....
e.g. D:\ARCHIVE\Photos and Videos\Family\2010....
This would then allow me to compare folders more easily.

So, as outlined, I thought to start with I need all the variations of the same image or document in the same folder so I can delete the ones I don't want. Initially this might mean 5 copies of the same photo but I guess it can be de-duplicated.
But maybe tha's not the best/sensible way of doing things??

As long as I don't lose the creation date in the file name, or the meta info I will be OK.
However, the folder names are very helpful to the subject.
e.g. C:/photos and movies/Family/Holidays/2009

So I was wondering whether logging the folder and file names during copying was an answer.....


....But I stopped here and thought it would probably be more helpful if I asked for some professional advice, and certainly from someone who has crossed this bridge before!

Like you would expect, I dont want to lose anything until the master archive is safe on at least one hard drive.


Help please guys...

Anne