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Demetrius

A python library for finding and copying files within their parent directories.

NOTE

Feel free to send pull requests by having a look at the FIXMEs and TODOs inside demetrius.py

Motivation

Your Grandpa gives you his PC and asks you if you could make a backup of his photos and videos. There's just one problem: All his mediafiles are stored in different folders and in different locations on his drive! In case you don't want to go manually through each folder, this is a case for demetrius. Just pass in the source and destination directory and demetrius will crawl through all the folders, find files whose extensions match the extensions you are looking for and copies the files in the destination directory.

Demetrius will copy files within their parent directory to ensure that you don't end up with one destination folder where all files are stored in. So for example, all files within a folder holiday in the source directory will also be in a holiday folder in the destination directory. Demetrius also takes care of duplicate folder names. For example, if there are several holiday folders on Grandpa's PC (which is not unlikely, because Grandpa forgot that it might have been a good idea to specify a unique name for each holiday he spent with the family...) demetrius will conserve the original structure and creates holiday, holiday_2, etc..

Finally, Demetrius also respect case insensitive OS like Windows where you can't create a folder holiday and Holiday in the same directory (e.g. by adding indices ('holiday (1)','Holiday (2)')).

Usage

Demetrius can be used via the console. For example: python demetrius.py -src ./foo -dst ./bar will copy all found files in ./foo to ./bar withing their parent directories. For that, the script uses all file suffixes found in suffixes.json for the search. You can also filter for specifc file suffixes via the -sfx flag (e.g. -sfx png jpg) or even for broad file categories using the -cat flag (e.g. -cat video for only searching for video files). Use the -e flag if you want to ignore certain directories and their children directories (e.g. -e Windows "Program Files"). Use -v if you want demetrius to show progress information.

What Demetrius can't do

Demetrius is dumb. If you have a folder in the source directory that is called foobar which contains a file named 123.png (which is a photo of dickbutt) it will copy that with that folder to the destination directory. Accordingly, you have to weight demetrius's dumbness against how much time you want to spend with manually clicking through Grandpas PC. U

Links

I can strongly recommend to run AntiDupl after Demetrius was run to identify file duplicates.

Related projects

Total Commander had a plugin called Copy Tree that did exactly what demetrius does. The project site is down, so here's a link from the Wayback Machine

Preview

Before Demetrius

After Demetrius

src/
┣ grandpa.doe/
┃ ┗ Holiday/
┃   ┗ lena.png
┣ holiday/
┃ ┗ lena.png
┣ jane.doe/
┃ ┗ holiday/
┃   ┗ lena.png
┣ john.doe/
┃ ┗ Holiday/
┃   ┗ lena.png
┗ .lena.png
dst/
┣ Holiday_1 (1)/
┃ ┗ lena.png
┣ Holiday_2 (1)/
┃ ┗ lena.png
┣ holiday_1 (2)/
┃ ┗ lena.png
┣ holiday_2 (2)/
┃ ┗ lena.png
┗ src/
  ┗ .lena.png