Need a deduper plugin with comprehensible Help

[nemadeka]

Good day,

I have 2 folder trees recovered from the same HDD (an accidental deletion) by 2 different tools.

I need a plugin which would delete duplicates, it must be able to know that folder tree 1 is primary and folder tree 2 is secondary, so that I could avoid marking 674673675857786 files for deletion by hand, naturally making a lot of fatal errors.

Please kindly advise which plugin does this, and it must have Help written in one of the human languages, not a in dialect of Vogonian, like TC Help.

Thanks a lot! :^)

[petermad]

Maybe you could use TC's Synchronization tool to update tree 2 with the newer files from tree 1 (put tree 1 on the left side and tree 2 on the right side).

If you want to delete files that exist in tree 2 but does not exist in tree 1, then use the Asymmeric option.

[Dalai]

I second petermad's suggestion, provided the two directory trees have the same structure, and the file names within them are identical. If they're not, you could use TC's search for duplicates, but then these files must have some kind of match (size, name, contents), and you'd probably have more work this way.

Regards
Dalai

[mmm]

Dalai wrote:

If they're not, you could use TC's search for duplicates,

I find your suggestion interesting.

Would you do me a favor and elaborate on the Find duplicates method when synchronizing two data structures as Nemadeka?
Having tested this approach several times I concluded that "Find duplicate files" works on a single hierarchy only.
What am I missing?

Many thanks,
mmm

[Dalai]

What am I missing?

You can specify multiple locations in the "Search in" field, separated by semicolon (see TC help when pressing F1 in TC's search window). When doing a search in multiple locations, TC can also search for duplicates over them as a whole. Put another way: TC searches for duplicates in all of the results found by the search, including all locations specified in the "Search in" field.

So, just put two (or more) locations in the "Search in" field and you'll be able to find duplicates within multiple directory trees.

HTH

Regards
Dalai

[ghisler(Author)]

After the search completes, click on "Feed to listbox" and then press "+" on the numeric keypad or choose Mark - Select group. It allows you to select files by their location, so you can remove those in the secondary location only.

[mmm]

I see. Thanx for your hint. Yet I am tad suspicious of this methodology. Let me raise a follow-up question.

Suppose you have a single instance of a file in the source/primary data structure and two instances of the same file in the target/secondary, do you think that the "Select duplicate files" dialog will help the user identify the cross-duplicated file in the target/secondary structure in a reasonable time?

Would the manual part of this process be doable for 2000+ items in the list?

[Dalai]

[...] do you think that the "Select duplicate files" dialog will help the user identify the cross-duplicated file in the target/secondary structure in a reasonable time?

It depends on what criteria the files/duplicates have, and of course which search parameters were used to find the duplicates.

Would the manual part of this process be doable for 2000+ items in the list?

Sure, it's just a matter of how much work one is willing to invest .

Regards
Dalai

[mmm]

Nemadeka,
Do me a favor and let us know whether you've successfully accomplished your job using TC.
When I was in your shoes a while ago I failed; that's where my request stems from.

And yes, TC Help does not seem to be perfect. You might consider being vocal about specific issues in this forum.

Thanks and regards,
mmm

[nemadeka]

Good day, everyone, my sincere apologies for the silence, too many distractions.
The folder trees are not identical, they are different.
I need to delete duplicates with the same name and size.
While doing this, I want to tell TC to delete files from one of the folders, and leave them in the other one.

UPD:
I'll come back with my results, I promise.
In addition to different directory structure, the number of duplicates varies from a pair to 7. I'll try to apply the suggested solutions and see how greatly they reduce the "hand work".

[Dalai]

2nemadeka
As already pointed out, you can use TC's search function and let it search for duplicates. Then you can take the steps mentioned by Ghisler to make it easier to actually delete the duplicates.

Regards
Dalai

[nemadeka]

After the search completes, click on "Feed to listbox" and then press "+" on the numeric keypad or choose Mark - Select group. It allows you to select files by their location, so you can remove those in the secondary location only.

I used this workflow, and this proved more efficient and faster than the dedicated tools, including Fast Duplicate Finder which took several hours searching and then crashed.

There were about 160 000 dupes. The time was slightly above an hour.

[nemadeka]

I want to thank everyone who came in to help me.