What to look for when cleaning duplicates

Backups of critical files are — of course — important, so any file cleaning needs to bear this in mind. Also you may have renamed a file without changing its content, so a good duplicate finder utility should not simply match files by their names (which could be disastrous if two completely separate files with the same name become linked together), but also by the file’s properties, too, from its size to the date it was last modified — that’s especially important with digital photos that have been downloaded from different cloud providers, each one naming them differently. And what about the legions of digital photos cluttering up space on your hard drive? It’s not uncommon to take five or more shots to ensure you get one usable one, but what about the rest? You only want to keep the best copy, but manually trawling through all your photographs can be a daunting task. Panic not — we’ll reveal a tool that makes this job that bit simpler.

The end result should be this: You have one master copy of your files, plus as many backups as you need. These could be stored as an exact backup copy in one backup folder (which you’ll need to identify to make sure it’s ignored by the duplicate file finder), or you might have them backed up using a tool such as Windows’ own File History, in which case, the backup won’t be touched by your file weeding. All other copies — or slight variations — then become candidates for removal.