I actually ended up making a list with my specific needs and my goals: To clear out my internal magnetic hard drive, I need to make space on my external drives, beginning with. Few things are more frustrating than to abandon your duplicate killing spree because it has become too tedious, only to return to the task a couple of months later with only a sketchy memory of what you originally set out to do. This could take a while, so make your time count. In any case, make sure to get your priorities straight before you start. If you have a more specific goal, such as whipping your photo folders or your sprawling music collection in shape, your priorities will be different: You’re not just looking for exact duplicates, but also for reduced-resolution copies of photos as well as older, inferior rips of your favorite albums which you have since re-encoded in a more modern format. Office documents are usually too small to matter much here even photos and audio files may not be worth your time when your external drives are clogged up with old system backups.
If you are running short on storage space, you will want to concentrate on large files only: backup containers, videos, music and photos – in descending order. Your specific situation will set your specific goals in getting rid of duplicates. I also unearthed three rather unwieldy music collections rescued from various portable audio players before their retirement. Then there was an ancient backup folder of photos which followed a categorization I have since ditched. Some dupes were leftovers from when I emptied thumb drives before lending them to friends, others were results of a desperate attempt to rescue data from a failing drive. They were spread across multiple drives, some of them internal, others external. I, for one, suddenly found myself with more potential duplicate folders than I could sift through by hand. This probably means that you have far more copies than you actually need, and that they’re all over the place. Let’s assume you’re a bit like me and that you have tried to follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, then let things slip for a while and now you are trying to get back on track.
away from other backups.Īs basic as this sounds, following through can become tough. You may have heard of the 3-2-1 backup rule – it’s fairly simple:ģ - Keep at least three copies of your data,Ģ - store two backup copies on different storage media, andġ - store one backup off-site, i.e. It’s generally considered a good idea to keep three copies of every file that is important to you. Even though having a desktop.ini file in every photo folder may seem redundant, they actually serve a purpose. Windows itself keeps multiple copies of some important files, which you should not touch.
Let me briefly point out that, generally speaking, duplicates are not merely good: they are essential.
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