Does anyone have a useful/workable way to find duplicate files on your Mac hard drive?
— Wellington
MacMost Q&A Forum • View All Forum Questions • Ask a Question
Find Duplicate files
Comments: 6 Responses to “Find Duplicate files”
Comments Closed.
This isn't something I've had to worry about too often. But I did try out Tidy Up! a while ago and found it worked well.
Hi Gary,
I'm trying to clean up my hard drive - Macbook Pro running Lion. I know I can get an external program to help with this, but I'd rather try using what comes with the Mac. I've looked at your video for the new search options with Lion. Are there any suggestions you have for finding duplicates using Mac tools or would you still recommend an external program?
Thank you for providing so much really quality content!
Sue
Depends on what you are looking for. I think there is no substitute for doing it manually. A program can't really know what you need and don't need. It can't know which one of a duplicate is the right one to keep (so you can find it later. Also, looking yourself will help you identify WHY you have duplicates and maybe you can change your work habits so you don't have those later on.
Thanks!
I'm a photographer and occasionally have duplicate files in different folders, files that can read 72MB EACH. I'm getting a 'low on space' message and want to find and massage these files. Any way of doing this w/Lion?
As always Gary, thanks for your help.
There's no function that will be able to accurately guess duplicate, but unnecessary files. You've got to just spend the time to clean house. And while you are doing that figure out why you may be creating the duplicates so you can adjust your behavior and not have to deal with it anymore.
I'm not sure that a few 72MB files will help much, though. That doesn't take up much space. Check out episode 611:
http://macmost.com/what-to-do-when-your-hard-drive-is-full.html