Make your hard drive more manageable
Discover how to bring order to your chaotic hard drive.
Your PC is hopefully noticeably zippier, but there’s still room for improvement. Before we tackle a really deep spring clean, let’s divert our attention for a moment to hard drive management. Unless you’re the most organised person in the world, it’s likely your filing system is a little haphazard. And if you’ve got multiple hard drives, it’s likely you have multiple copies of files, too.
First, consult the box below for general advice on what to look for when rooting out and removing duplicates — this could save you from potentially deleting the wrong file or files when you come to clean up.
FIND DUPLICATES QUICKLY
CCleaner comes with a built-in file duplicate finder, but it’s not very sophisticated. It matches purely on file name, size and date last modified. We want something more thorough, so download the free version of Duplicate Cleaner ( www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/ duplicatecleaner.html), which has all the functionality you need.
First, choose what to search for — the default options search files by content rather than name, size or date. You can also set filters — such as documents, pictures or music — or files to include or exclude, plus limit your search to files of a certain size and date. For a system-wide sweep, leave the defaults as they are and switch to the ‘Scan Location’ tab.
Next, elect where to search using the tools provided — whether it’s entire drives or specific folders. If you want to exclude a specific location, add it in the usual way, then right-click it and choose ‘Exclude Selected Path(s)’. When you’re ready, click the ‘Scan Now’ button and wait while Duplicate Cleaner does its work — it’s not a quick process, so be prepared to leave your PC on for several hours or even overnight, depending on the size of the folders you’re scanning. If necessary, minimise the scan window while you work on other tasks.
You can review the results on the ‘Duplicate Files’ tab (‘Duplicate Folders’ is restricted to Pro users only) — they’re listed in no particular order. Focus on the largest files by clicking the ‘Size’ column header twice. You can now go through the list, manually selecting the duplicates you wish to remove or you can use the ‘Selection Assistant’ buttons to speed things up. If you have a single folder or location where your original files sit, you can specify that with ‘Select by Location’, which tells Duplicate Cleaner to target files in other folders for deletion. Once done, you can select all other files by clicking the magic wand button, and choosing ‘Mark > Select by group > All but one file in each group’.
Duplicate Cleaner offers many matching tools to try to automate the selection process, but you may find it’s easier, quicker, and safer to go through the list by hand, weeding out unwanted files, and periodically clicking ‘File Removal’. From here, you can choose whether to delete the file completely, or send it to the Recycle Bin.
The program can be quite slow at times, and appear non-responsive.
The trick is to be patient, and it soon comes back to life. If there’s a long list of files to clean, you may want to take a break. Simply close the program — when you next launch Duplicate Cleaner, your results are ready and waiting for you to continue processing.
MANAGE YOUR PHOTOS
When it comes to managing your photos, you need a tool that can search for similar-looking images, as well as identical matches. You’ll have to upgrade to the Pro version of Duplicate Cleaner for that functionality, so our favorite alternative is the free — and open-source — AntiDupl ( antidupl. sourceforge.net/english/index.html). Download the latest version and double-click the .exe file to extract the program folder. Open this, and doubleclick ‘AntiDupl.NET.exe’ to get started. The step-by-step guide reveals the basic procedure you need to follow, but as always, it pays to move slowly through each photo in the list, to be sure you’ve got the right match.
By default, AntiDupl assumes the first folder you added to it is the ‘master’ folder — the one where the files are (by default) left untouched. When the search results appear, you’ll see a preview of each photo on the left, complete with basic information confirming the match. Next to each photo, you’ll see three buttons: taking the first photo, the top-most button deletes both copies, while the second icon overwrites the second copy with the first. The next button removes the top photo.
Below the two arrow buttons, you’ll see three similar buttons, with the first one highlighted in red, indicating that the second photo is set to be deleted by default. Below this is a button allowing the second copy to overwrite the top one, and the final button — the hand signal — allows you to mark this match as a ‘mistake’, ensuring it’s ignored in future.
Click a button, and the desired action is performed now, and the next item is selected, ready for you to act on. You’ll see similar buttons appear under the menu bar — if you select multiple entries together using ‘Ctrl-click’, you can click these buttons to perform the same action on all the matches. There’s also a ‘Process selected results automatically’ button for applying the default action to all of the results — not something we recommend, unless you’re feeling very brave or working on a small set of results.
As you go down the list, you’ll come to photos that aren’t exact matches, allowing you to remove similar photos, too. All deleted photos are sent to the Recycle Bin by default, giving you a fail-safe in case you make a mistake, so be sure to empty the Bin once you’re happy to free up the space.