find remove duplicate files on external hard drive

[lasloduncan]

Imac high sierra--somehow mysteriously (fat fingers) I moved all of documents to a hard drive in order to begin cleaning up my 5 y.o imac..somehow I duplicated those files...I would like to keep one copy of each and delete the unnecessary copy--I tried a couple of the "free" typical ripoff bs deals...with expected and unsurprising results...

so now macrumors ...--usually where I end up after giving it a trial and error shot on my own...thanks

so select out dups and delete should be a pretty common and successfully addressed user run of the mill fat finger deal ...

 

[lasloduncan]

no takers???

 

[jdelgado]

Hi
I have used a few duplicate finders. I found out that the choice may depend on your workflow and how you want/need the found duplicates reported. I regularly use dupeGuru, Duplicate Detective, Gemini 2, Singlemizer, among others.
Some of these find/collect duplicate folders and "similar" files (useful for music and images).
Because I am a bit paranoid, I run the file sets I want to compare through two or three of the above, and then check results before deleting.
Although not a duplicate finder, I also use "Find Empty Folders". This detects empty folders that may result from deleting duplicate files.
Hope the above helps.

 

[lasloduncan]

Yes of course it does --my surprise is that apple and co, doesn't seem to have something for users in this regard. thank you very much they have all kinds of other crap noone uses or wants ahahhah-somehow, fat fingers- I dup'ed all of my doc's that I was moving off of my imac to an ext drive..so that is the issue- I want those dups off of that drive should be fairly simple heh famous last words ...thanks again-btw paranoid may not be enough anymore heheh-- so are we paranoid enough? is the question

 

[jdelgado]

Glad it is useful.
I forgot to mention that if the "structure" of your duplicates is the same or similar to your originals, in the sense of folder structure/hierarchy, you may want to try duplicate detective first. It may identify quickly complete folders and save you some time.

 

[lasloduncan]

Thanx some of these seem overly confusing ..this should be pretty straight forward- plug in the drive hit go...will check it later this morning thanks again.

 

[lasloduncan]

so far not free...so far I still have my duplicates......identify and delete ..free is my deal apparently not with the free apps....so still gotem...maybe there is upside here....

 

[jdelgado]

I did not realize that you were looking for free stuff; sorry.
I recall I tried free options and none worked as I wanted to. This was a long time ago so things might have changed since then.

 

[lasloduncan]

probably for the worse...now I have disk drill and cannot uninstall it ...wont show up except in tool bar--I hate this **** takes me two days to research implement and with a dozen or so sputtering tries...thanks.
[doublepost=1535736166][/doublepost]ok got it ...I think..went perf logon item pulled it out of there then act monitor and did a force quit however not the name of "disk drill" some alternate, that doesn't belong there...anyway done....