consolidate scattered files and new backup strategy

[oakrrl]

I'm about to get a new (finally upgraded) iMac, and because of a history of glitches and panic/repair/recovery of files, my documents are now scattered across a number of places: in addition to the internal drive they're on two external hard drives, Dropbox, Crashplan, iCloud drive. Plus the internal drive of a MacBook 12. I have time machine backups, an old clone (via Carbon Copy), etc. Before installing docs on new iMac I want to consolidate, but it's hard to tell what is where, which are duplicates, which are unique. Probably about 750 GB to 1.5 TB all told.
MAIN QUESTION: I know there are various utilities which purport to help with this - any suggestions for a strategy & a utility or utilities would be welcome.
One possibility I've thought of: gather all the files on a new, inexpensive large-capacity HDD, then run a file duplicate finder????
FOR THE FUTURE: When setting up my new iMac, I'm tempted to put all my docs in Dropbox (so I can access from multiple computers) except Photoshop and Final Cut files which need heavy lifting - put those on the internal SSD. Would it make sense for backup to have an external hard drive with two partitions, one for the files on Dropbox (using Carbon Copy Cloner) and one for the files on the internal SSD? Or suggest some other backup strategy? (Time Machine seems too limited....)
Many thanks for any advice!

 

[Velin]

Time to get into terminal commands, because what you are trying to do can be accomplished with just a few line commands in terminal. Don't need to buy anything other than your storage. These include the "cp" "ditto" and "rsync". I use the DITTO command quite a bit, great terminal command and rock-solid.

http://osxdaily.com/2014/06/11/use-ditto-copy-files-directories-mac-command-line/

https://www.howtogeek.com/198043/ho...os-x-without-losing-all-your-files-seriously/

https://www.cnet.com/news/using-the-os-x-terminal-instead-of-the-finder-to-copy-files/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40974029/what-is-difference-between-cp-and-ditto-command-on-osx

http://www.techradar.com/how-to/computing/apple/using-rsync-to-keep-your-files-in-sync-1305698

Dropbox works great on Mac. And yes, you can store a lot of stuff with it. Makes sense to move your big images/movies to a backup drive and not upload to Dropbox. If it were me, I'd probably get two external drives, in case one fails. Storage is ridiculously cheap, why risk everything on one partitioned drive, which is going to be accessed pretty regularly using Dropbox (my platter is always whirring).