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.