My records management class, although now over a month completed, has still got me thinking in the ways of my personal file management. My computer has about 180GB of memory in its harddrive. While at the time–2006– it seemed like it would last forever, the advent of larger and larger files such as MP3’s and Photoshop documents have already brought me to about 50%. I finally decided to look for a program to help with the process. Searching “duplicate files” in Google lead me to NoClone 2007, which advertises itself with the following capabilities
- True byte-by-byte comparison: Accurate, no false duplicates
- Uncover exact duplicate files, similar files and duplicate Microsoft Outlook emails
- Time-saving Smart Marker to help remove duplicate files
- SaveSpace: Delete, replace by NTFS links & shortcuts, move/archive
Downloading the 30-day trial, I decided to use it on the music files first. I inherited the music library of one of my friends, so the content is mostly unknown and I have noticed duplicates. My first pass resulted in 22 files to be deleted. This freed up approximately 60MB of space, over half a GB. I was impressed. I then sent the program in the direction of the My Documents folder, which ends up being where I put files when I’m done wth them. The trial version only lets you delete 30 files at a time and I had selected over 150 when I realized that I would have to do this in stages.
Activities such as moving files from one computer to another, using a flashdrive and editing and creating drafts are main causes of the duplicate files on my system. Creating folders that have similar uses, different names and the same files is another. This program shows you the name, location, file size and file type of each of the files that it believes are duplicates. I found the file location to be most helpful, especially when choosing which of the 2 or 4 files did not need to be present. In some cases, all 4 copies were kept. Identifying the files can be, and probably needs to be, an automated process, but the decision on what to be kept or deleted needs to be a human-made choice.
What I’ve found from this is not only do I have duplicate files, but I have duplicate folder types. Folders I created with similar purposes, similar documents, but they don’t need to be two separate entities. I like how simple this is. It keeps track of cumulative statistics and so far I’ve deleted over 220 MB or 2.2 GB of dulplicate files.