Chore Day, May 30, 2020 -- The Problem of Deleting Duplicate Files

No cooking today. Instead I did the house cleaning — vacuuming and cleaning the bathroom.

I spent the rest of the day looking for a solution to a problem: finding and removing duplicate files. It sounds like a simple problem, but if you have 600GB of images, it’s a BIG problem. For the last two weekends I’ve been collecting my family’s photo libraries so that we can make picture books with the snapshots we’ve taken over the years. We have photographs from the ancient times when cameras used film and since we started using digital cameras, we have many thousands of pictures that have never been printed. 99% of the digital images are hidden away in forgotten corners of decrepit hard drives. After Taco passed away, we resolved to take the time to back up all of our images and archive them on multiple hard drives. I’ve got them all together and we have more than 150,000 images. I would estimate that 50% of them are duplicates.

With so many duplicates, going them one at a time is a losing proposition. Some files have been copied so many times that there are 10 duplicates! I want to find software that will find the duplicates and then give me the tools to remove them. I’ve looked at half a dozen software packages, but most of them come up short of handling this big job. There is one program that may be up to the task, Duplicate File Finder. It’s subscription software that costs $60 a year, but there a $20 discount. I’m cautiously optimistic.