Recently I’ve come across a few lists from people listing the software that they find essential to their lives. While I could probably put together a list of the go-to programs I use on a routine basis, my experience trying to free a bit of disk space on my computer has prompted me to take a slightly different course.

In the course of migrating from computer to computer, hard drive to hard drive semi-regularly over the past few years, I’ve found it most important to ensure the longetivity of my data. The result, of course, is a lot of waste: leftover program files, Windows installations, duplicated documents, and the like all gather up. Ultimately, so long as there is no way to ensure that I will not lose anything of my creation, I am unwilling to delete things.

I’ve also been trying to keep track of a budding collection of digital pictures. Yet, again, I can never seem to keep things in the same place, and with my tendency to copy new pictures whereever I can fit them, sorting them later, and then not knowing whether the pictures were ever copied in the first place, a number of copies have built up on my various hard drives.

Enter Duplicate File Finder. A quick adjustment of default search filters and it’s off, and less than an hour later I have a list of a bunch of copies of files I don’t need. What’s left is to check off the files I don’t want kept. DFF, as it happens, lists smaller files first, so the running tally of space you’re freeing up grows exponentially as you progress. (I don’t think that was intentional, but still.)

Unfortunately, DFF isn’t a perfect solution. The big snag I hit was that once you’ve selected all the files you want to delete, there’s actually no way to just delete those files–you have to move them to either the Recycle Bin or a folder of your choosing. As it so happened I didn’t have any drive with the ~20 gigs free that I needed (all stuff I was deleting, and there were about 10 more gigs of stuff I could have wiped) to move my files, so I just chose my biggest drive and deleted the first round of files before the drive could fill up. Problem solved.

There were some other issues I encountered, too, though. While it’s convenient to mark an entire folder as a duplicate, it would be truly incredible to be able to include subfolders in that–that alone probably would have saved me a fair bit of time. And I’m not sure that there’s any check to see if you’re mistakenly deleting all instances of a file–I probably would have felt a bit more confident had I known that, even if my copies were being left in different places, that at least one copy of each file was left somewhere. There are a number of things that could be changed to make DFF a more friendly, more effective application, but as it is it seems to get the job done.

Of course, the next step for me is probably to start duplicating files again–but hopefully in a controlled setting, in order to keep separate, automatically-synchronized backups on separate physical disk drives. (The magic of home networking will hopefully extend this to separate computers, as well.) It was nice to free up some needed space, though, and to identify some of the unnecessary and redundant backups I had lying around.

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