Need to cleanup a family member's archive of pictures which are a complete mess. Multiple dupes in multiple folders, random back-ups of back-ups, some maybe not backed up... tens of thousands of files all jumbled together across multiple drives with no consistent labeling.
Would really appreciate any advice or recommendations for software tools and workflow. A simple file duplicate finder isn't sophisticated enough for this job and I am hoping someone who has tacked a mess like this can share some wisdom. How can I efficiently select and delete many thousands of dupes in order to create a single archive that can then be backed up as a whole?
Hi Mark,
I don't know if there is an application that can do all the work, but there may be an approach to create some order in the chaos.
One step could be to copy all files into a single directory/folder. You could use an application that detects exact duplicates based on a hash value, so differently named files with the same content will be skipped.
That will create a de-duplicated list of files. Maybe that's all you need, if so then you're done.
If you want to preserve some of the folder structure you can delete all files which have a duplicate in the above created single de-duplicated folder, except for one folder you want to keep intact.
That will allow, step by step to either keep, empty, or eliminate folders except for one that has the correct structure. You then copy files without a duplicate from the deduplicated folder to their new destination.
A free application that can assist with managing this process, in Backup mode, is FreeFileSync:
https://freefilesync.org/Cheers,
Bart