It seems to me that I keep organizing, then re-organizing, then re-organizing.. and the list and list goes on. Be it music, pictures, movies, whatever.. If I’m putting it on a computer, I want to have it organized.
The problem is, most of the times the data is spread across so many drives, duplicates are going to happen, whether I like it or not, perhaps I clicked on ‘rename’ when I wanted to simply move files over to another directory.. who knows?
In any case, I’ve had a really tough time finding the right tool – until now. CloneSpy has done the job for me, and as we speak, I’ve put my hard drive on the weight loss supplements that I don’t need to buy! I love freeware!
Head on over to CloneSpy’s homepage and download it. If you are heading out on the town tonight, and don’t want to sit in front of your computer but wouldn’t mind doing this.. that’s all the better! See what it does is create a unique ‘fingerprint’ of each file called a CRC Checksum. This fingerprint is then compared to the other fingerprints that you have in your pool. So for example – if you had all your music in a directory called c:\my music\, then you could simply choose that folder – then use the following settings on the page to scan through all your files.
Note – The first time I ran this is PROMPTED ME EVERY FILE, which is not what I wanted to do – so in the options – go into the following options to change it from prompting every time a duplicate is found (unless that’s what you want):
Change the setting so that it doesn't prompt you every time it finds a duplicate
To find out how fast it works, I just scanned almost 2000 high resolution DVD cover images in 6.5 minutes – it was able to report to me that I actually somehow ended up duplicating most of my files, so I cleared them and saved myself 4.6 gigs of space. (Sweet!)
What I also did was since personally I ended up renaming most of my files with (1) at the end, is just choose to mark the longer file names in each of the pairs, then delete it based on that. I did however REVIEW ALL THE FILES to make sure I didn’t delete ones that weren’t supposed to be.
Also a great idea to choose is to delete to a seperate folder instead of deleting to the recycle bin or delete permanently. You can change those options as well.
Choose to move to a different folder just to be on the safe side (I have it set to go to the recycle bin)
Anyhow.. very handy, and I plan on using it for both my pictures and for my music… I’m very excited about the music idea as I know I have a lot of duplicates and that’s going to save a lot of space.