Cleanup your Disk Files and Backups with CCleaner Duplicate File Finder

Now that you have done step one on your computer or laptop and have upgraded from Windows 7/8/8.1 to Windows 10, you may still have a few weeks of work ahead of you.  Luckily, there are tools that I will describe to aid you in cleaning up your computer.  Many of us have cloud drives, backups, and are constantly creating files.  When we do this we create duplicate files, duplicate backups, and multiple file revisions that become file chaos on our hard drives.  At some point we need to examine/compare our files to our backups, cloud drives and such.

What I found was I had many duplicate files on my newly upgraded Windows 10 computer.  Once upon a time I had stored files on cloud drives such as SpiderOak and Windows Live Mesh.  Mesh was deprecated and replaced with OneDrive and SpiderOak became unusable after I accidentally went over my 2GB storage limit.  I also had copied files to various directories on my computer, which also created duplicates.  Working with other people, such as my artist and editor, I had created many revisions of files.  These important files were still stored on my local computer hard drive, my backups, and USB drives.  In the past, I would bring up multiple copies of Windows Explorer (now called File Explorer avoiding confusion thank god in Windows 10 as I teach classes on Windows 7!) and try to root out and destroy duplicate files.  As you can imagine this was incredibly time consuming and proved ultimately to be an impossible task.

For many years I have been using and advocating that everyone using Windows install and use the free (or paid for) Piriform CCleaner tool.  (See:  http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner)  I use it to cleanup temporary files, wipe out cookies, look at startup files and more.  However, when I embarked on my disk file cleanup project I discovered the CCleaner also has a Duplicate File Finder tool.  This tool proved to be a quick and easy way for me to find all of those old duplicate files that were in my Mesh, SpiderOak and backup directories.  It made the elimination of all those duplicate files on my hard drive, backups and USB drive possible.  Try it out and I bet you will be surprised to discover how many duplicate files you have on your devices.

WinMerge Large File Compare Work-A-Round

One of the things I noticed comparing my C: drive files to my USB backups was the WinMerge utility did not error out on large files in separate directories.  What I discovered is you can move one large file to a new directory (C:\users\<username>\Tmp) for example, rename the file to the name of the file in the original directory, and compare the two directories.  WinMerge will recognize if the files are identical or not without erroring out.  If all files are identical, delete the TMP directory and all files in it.

What is cool that now WinMerge will work with all files enabling you to clean up all your backups!

Merge the files on your hard disk, cloud drive, USB drives and backups with WinMerge.org open source software

Removing duplicate files with CCleaner was only the first step to cleaning out your “basement” (disk cleanup process).  Now we need to merge all of your backup, old cloud drives, current cloud drives and so on.  We need a tool that we can use to compare the differences between files and help you make a decision on which file to keep.  That tool is provided by the WinMerge.org open source project.  It can be used to compare both folders and files, and presents differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and process.  You can quickly copy files back and forth, delete files, and even delete both files.  (See:  http://winmerge.org)

The merge process can be a long and painful depending on how organized you have been in the past.  Since disk space is cheap, we tend to make copies of file systems to back them up, thus creating many redundant files.  Sometimes we have multiple backup devices and do not keep track of what we backup where.  This results in many stored revisions of files that we work on regularly so at some point we need to organize, consolidate and combine all of these files.  This step in the Windows 7 to 10 upgrade cleanup process should make you consider how you are handling your backups and file systems as it certainly did me.