Cleaning up harddrive, need duplicate file sorter.

[ShockSlayer]

Yeah, so, I'm cleaning up my harddrive, gonna try to get all of my data into one place so that I can back everything up easier.

I've noticed through my periodic use of "Everything" that I have several duplicates of the same thing, namely music, from silly things like backing up SD cards and all that. I want to get rid of all those duplicates and just have one copy of each file in, basically, a large archive.

So, if I could find something that would, say, find all of my duplicate .mp3 files, delete all but one of them, and put them all into one folder, that would be perfect.

I googled a bit and found that there are programs that can do this, however, most of them are "free trial" versions and the like. I'm sure I could keep looking and find something, but I figured maybe some of you have gone through a process like this and perhaps found a good free program or two and can point me in the right direction.

Any input?

SS

[kibble]

I have several duplicates of the same thing, namely music, from silly things like backing up SD cards and all that. I want to get rid of all those duplicates and just have one copy of each file in, basically, a large archive.

Sounds exactly like the same problem I had.

One day I decided I was fed up so what I did was create a couple of folders with names of what I wanted them to be. Using dual screens, one side had the folders I was copying from and the other the folders I was moving/copying to. If a file came up as a duplicate during copying, I'd set it aside to verify it later and continue with everything else. Took me a long time, but now all my music is split up with no duplicates, my pictures are all separated into categories (except for a few that I need to go look into again) and all my, ahem, downloads are in one area with no duplicates.

I still do have a few items here and there that are duplicates but not to the extent that it was before. I managed to recover tens of gigs of space. I also have several hard drives dedicated to specific things, like one has media, another has install files/downloads, etc.

Using some program to do this would make it a lot easier, but I don't know if I'd trust it completely, unless it also checked the file size and stuff, cuz a lot of the time I would have several files that had the same filename, but were something completely different, which is why I set them aside to verify them, like I mentioned previously. I would have lost a lot of things if I had just gone by duplicate names.

[Snow_Cat]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/duplicatefilelo/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Maybe?

I recognise the authour's name but do not know if this is the utility I have used the last couple of times I needed to do this (it has been a while now that I am in the habit of keeping my files tidy.)

edit: no it is not, this version lacks the CRC options...

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-fr ... tector.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Hm... none of these resemble the one I liked- but they should work.

[cennar]

I'm the windows control find master.... you've got a shift key... you got find, or finder.... you can do the math.