I have multiple backups stored on external, how to remove dupe files

I'm embarrassed to post this, but before I understood anything about backing up and restoring wondows properly, I just saved my entire "My Documents" file that stored all my valuable family photos/vids. Now, several years later, I see I've got like 4 backups from the same PC and I probably have say 25,000 pics saved 4 times over, and many are surely dupes (duplicate copies of the same photos. Which proggie do you guys trust to remove duplicate files with minimal risk of deleting non-dupe photos? Thanks I keep them on my 1 TB external hard drive.

 

Yep, I sure do! Basically every time I had a nasty virus I couldn't resolve, I backed up the Documents folder and did a restore. When I did these, I didn't just add the newest photos, I dragged the entire contents to the external HDD (who has time to filter through 25,000 family photos? (-;/ Thanks DDP

 

I think I understand. At this point, I could probably just sort the pics by date and delete anything I saved after each "save". this could work out nicely, thank you. Beats sorting through 100,000 pics (25K per save)

 

Since you are dragging and dropping the 'My Documents" folder over from the PC to the external hard drive you should get a warning that "The folder already exists, do you want to overwrite it?" If you select "Yes" then the existing folder on the external hard drive will be over written. As the overwriting progresses you should get a warning that a particular file already exists and ask if you want to overwrite it. You can select 'yes' then select 'do this to all files or 'skip all duplicate files'. With this method you should only have one copy of 'all' files and a copy of the most recent files added to the existing "My Documents" folder. I hope this helps.

good2go7

 

flat out deleting folders is not a good idea unless you know for a fact that the new folder contains all of the others items....... if just one photo was deleted it will be gone forever

using the skip duplicates is likewise unwise since the duplicate is identified only by name

years ago i had a program that sorted by size then did a byte by byte compare of the contents (ignoring the file name) to identify dups. this is the most reliable since "Uncle Bob and aunt frieda" & "uncle bob and aunt frieda" are different (not to mention "aunt frieda and uncle bob")

the program would span the entire disk or compare individual folders as desired

unfortunately i have lost the program via disk crash and forget the name (or i would immediatly reinstall on current computer)

hope this info helps you refrain from losing a precious memory

 

as long as you don't accidentlly delete a file that will work... although there is another way to go that hasn't been mentioned yet..

for less than $200 (sales might be $150) you can buy a 4T drive and save the files as many times as you want

you probably spent that much for that 1T drive but by now another 1T can be bought around $60 and prices per byte keep dropping

just sayin'

 

why would you want to buy a 4tb drive and just keep copying the same folder over and over again once you put something new in it, makes no sense, delete the older folders, keep the new

 

edited by ddp