External Hard Drive "Tidier Upper"?

davetrousers

Hello Chaps, I have an 500 GB external HDD that over they past couple of years have been backing things up to. I haven't been at all organised so several things (folders, files, programmes etc.) will have been backed up more than once! The drive is now pretty full, and I need to do another big back up.

Is there a piece of of software that can look at the drive and tidy it up so that it only has 1 back up of everything?

Got a feeling I am asking the impossible.

Thanks

espresso

Try one of these free programs here.

andy2004

duplicate cleaners only work if the files are identical. I use the first one thats on the page. freeware for version 2.1.0 but shareware if you get version 3.
http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/duplicate-cleaner

whilst thats a good program for identical files, pretty useless is you have 2 files which are identical except for 1 byte difference. same file size but 1 bytes within that file being different.
so be careful when running it.

if you have jpgs on the external, you can make some free space by cleaning them, or removing data from the files which isnt required using a freeware program called Jstrip.http://davidcrowell.com/jstrip/
been using for years can remove upto 64K and more depending on the file.
cant think of anything else. but YOU are the best duplicate finder.