HOW TO Clean up your messy files

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LAUNCH FIND DUPLICATES Parallels Toolbox contains a large collection of useful tools, and version 4.5 includes a new “dashboard” that shows the tools you use the most. Just click on Find Duplicates to launch it.

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START SEARCHING The Find Duplicates tool is very straightforward. You can search any folders for duplicate files, either by dragging and dropping them into this window, or you can click Select to open the Mac’s standard Open dialog box.

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SELECT FOLDERS You can select multiple folders where you want to search for duplicate files, and Toolbox will also search any additional sub–folders stored within those folders. Just click the “Search for duplicates” button to start.

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SAVE RESULTS Here, it’s taken Parallels Toolbox 30 seconds to scan a folder with 10GB of old work files. Toolbox stores the results of that scan too, so that other scans in the future will be faster even if you add more files to that folder.

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SPOTLIGHT ON DUPLICATES As mentioned, the Find Duplicates tool works in a similar fashion to Spotlight, which makes it easy to use. It shows a list of the duplicate files on the left, with a preview of the file on the right.

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LOOK BEYOND THE NAME The app doesn’t only look for files that have the same name – it also compares the content of each file. Here, it has found identical photos of this webcam, and the files have different names.

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GO AUTO OR INSPECT By default, the app selects the oldest versions of every duplicate file to delete, and leaves the newest version alone. It can automatically delete all duplicates, but you can take a closer look at each file if you want.

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MAKE YOUR SELECTION There are other options available when searching for duplicate files. Instead of selecting the oldest file copies, you can tell the app to select the newest files, or tell it not to select any files at all.

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SORT AND FIND FILES If you’re looking for a particular type of file, then you can speed things up by sorting through files in alphabetical order, by file size, or file type. You can also arrange the list in ascending or descending order.