Digital Spring Clean

Fri, Jan 25, 2013

Today I decide to ‘dedup’ my external hard disk. I tend to dump random stuff on the disk and overtime a lot of doubling up has occured so I reckoned quite a bit of room could be made.

My tool of choice was the creatively named ‘Duplicate Files Finder’ which is free/libre open-source application available for Win/Mac/Linux.

The whole process took around 20mins to run, processing 465GB of data  / 52296 files.

Once finished, there were 11872 files (22.7%!) that were duplicates, totalling 1.8GB. Unsurprisingly, most of these were small and tended to be internal application data rather than stuff I’d created directly myself.