Question Duplicate files and folders

Jim Miller

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What's the best way to find and delete duplicate files and folders from my computer? After so many backups and file-saves, my computer has thousands of duplicate files and folders. How can I identify and delete them?
 
Personally, I like to do it manually. I don't trust the automated apps to organize things the way I might want them organized.

But there are a lot of utilities (some free and some not) for this. CCLEANER has such a feature, in their free version.

Just be careful to limit it to places like your pictures and document folders, not in important windows system file folders.
 
Thanks, Mike.

Mainly, I want to clean out the duplicate backups in one of my 8 TB external hard drives. On the Microsoft website this morning I found a free app called "Duplicate Cleaner Free 4.1.2". I tried it i just a portion of the drive and it seems to be working well, so I'll probably use it to go further.

UPDATE:
This app has found 50,933 duplicate files in my external hard drive. It's working to delete them now, which probably will take another half an hour or so.
 
Thanks, Mike.

Mainly, I want to clean out the duplicate backups in one of my 8 TB external hard drives. On the Microsoft website this morning I found a free app called "Duplicate Cleaner Free 4.1.2". I tried it i just a portion of the drive and it seems to be working well, so I'll probably use it to go further.

UPDATE:
This app has found 50,933 duplicate files in my external hard drive. It's working to delete them now, which probably will take another half an hour or so.
Does the app tell you how it decides what is a duplicate? Besides being the same size and name, does it also compare the datetime stamp?
 
Yes, this app asks you to identify the criteria for selection - creation date, modification date, file size, number of files in a folder, etc. It's quite comprehensive.

When I asked it to search for duplicates in an 8 TB external hard drive with more than 2.4 million files, it found more than 55,000 duplicates (95.5 GB). I asked the app to delete all of the duplicates except the newest (by modified date/time) file and the largest file in each group. It's going to take much longer to delete the duplicates than I anticipated - it's been going on for about 35 minutes and has achieved 45% completion. There are about 28,000 files (42.9 GB) remaining to be processed.

The computer is plugged in and elevated for good ventilation, so I'll just let it run until it's done. 🥴
 
... or create a fresh full backup that has it all, and zap everything else.

I back up my computers manually, by date. The 8tb external backup drives will have multiple folders for each computer, with different dates. Within each, i have folders like documents, pictures, music, cmc folder, etc. I have 3 of these drives, also in rotation. The shop computers are also on these drives. I try to keep a few generations of backups, but eventually zap the oldest of each.
 
... or create a fresh full backup that has it all, and zap everything else.
Don't think I can do that, because these backups have come from a dozen or so different drives over a period of years. However, I backup the currently-used drives as you suggest.
 
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