Photo De-duplication, Organisation and Backup

[landyvlad]

OK so this is a 3part question.

De-Duplication
I have a bunch of photos (many of which will be duplicates) in a LOT of folders spread across 3 hard drives, 2 SSD's and a NAS. (But we'll leave the NAS out of this for the time being mostly because its broken...)

What I need to do is:
-Identify and delete (or quarantine) duplicates, ensuring that I keep the highest res versions in each case.
I need to identify duplicates based on content not just filename .
I suspect I have:
- a lot of different photos with the same filename, and
- a lot of the same photos with different filenames.
Also if an image has say a RAW and a JPG version - keep both.

Advice welcome.


Organisation

Once I've de-duplicated I would like to organise the images in some way. Now obviously YYYYMMDD from the metadata would be easiest to accomplish BUT
- some files don't have metadata attached with date info.
- date info is often wrong if camera didn't have date set correctly.
- simple numeric systems like that make it hard to identify (from the folder structure) what the contents are.

I'd prefer to avoid, if possible, being tied into a particular piece of software (I'm looking at you Adobe Lightroom) for tagging and library management. Something more generic and ideally FREE would be preferred, if such a thing exists.

Advice welcome.


Backup

Once I have the above taken care of, I'd like to have a means of backing up my photos regularly (eg ONE-WAY sync to an external drive)

How are other people managing this?


Thank you