While reading Adam’s article about duplicates in iTunes library, I decided to mess around a little with in my own library. Those who are following my blog most probably know that I’ve switched to Mac recently (personal friends also know I’ve changed my MacBook to MBP just few months ago) so had some hassles moving files back and forth. Skimming through iTunes library duff did not discover big mysteries, I really had only few (19 out of 2691 to be precise) duplicates.
But, then I decided to check my whole home folder (duff -r ~). Here are my stats:
- 3651 files having at least one duplicate
- 2903 files having 1 duplicate
- 335 files with 2 duplicates
- 154 files w/ 3 duplicates
- 23 files w/ 4 duplicates
- others are more system-wide duplicates for internal needs and can be ignored
What a mess!!! Time for clean-up.
2 comments ↓
Such a nice cut-off disk usage utility you have here. However, I still don’t understand how to clean up my duplicate files (maybe I’m a bit slow, I only know how to detect the number of duplicated files I have). If you don’t mind can you explain it a little further. Thanks. ^^
Well afterwards – it’s all manual. Problem is – no program can actually know which of the duplicates you want to keep and which to remove. As for me – mostly it’s directories that are duplicated rather than single files so it’s not a really big deal to identify a duplicate dir and remove the one you don’t really need. In the original Adam’s article, he explains how to remove duplicates from iTunes library, but it’s the other case as iTunes manages it’s library based on the file info rather than full path to the file, moreover – duplicates tend to get into the same directory so removing files automatically does mess up your library.
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