Windows Help & Advice – May 2019

60 |^ |^ May 2019

O

ver time, your machine’s

drive becomes cluttered

up with data files of all

shapes, sizes and types.

Compounding things

are the way in which

duplicates can quickly swallow up more

storage space thanks to disorganised

backups or the fact you have five

near-identical copies for every snap you

take on your phone or digital camera.

The longer this process goes on, the

harder it can be to face up to the

problem, but today’s the day you finally

take steps to not only consolidate your

files properly, but free up space too.

First steps

For this process to work, you need to

work out where you are going to store

everything. You also need to remember

that moving files to a secondary drive

isn’t the same as backing them up if

they remain the only copy in existence,

so be sure to keep two copies of key

files on separate drives.

Start by taking an inventory of all the

available drives: your PC’s internal drive

or drives, plus any external (USB or

network) drives that you possess. First,

determine how you’d like to organise

them going forward. Use a spreadsheet

or note-taking tool to help you visualise

what you’d like to do.

If you want to take an inventory of

each drive’s contents for manually

comparing it, then save yourself a huge

task by installing the trial version of

WinCatalog 2018 (www.wincatalog.

com/free.html). There’s a fully featured

30-day trial so you can see whether the

app suits your needs – a personal

licence costs $29.95 (£23.30).

Once installed, launch the program

and create a catalogue file when

prompted. Then click the Disk button to

select your first drive. Click ‘Options’ to

choose exactly what to add to the

catalogue – you may wish to restrict it to

covering specific content, or even just

provide a list of folders, which will speed

up the scanning process considerably,

although you’ll be limited in what you

can do with the program.

Once your drives have been indexed

• which can take a while – you can then
  start to see how data is currently spread
  across your drives, making it easy to
  visualise where you’d like your files to
  go. If you index everything on your
  drives, you can even use WinCatalog’s
  Search tool to try and track down files
  you’ve mislaid – perhaps they weren’t

accidentally deleted after all, merely

buried deep inside your file system.

Get rid of duplicates

One of the most important actions

when consolidating your files is to weed

out duplicates. Not only will you free up

stacks of space, you’ll avoid wondering

what happened to your recent edits

because you’ve opened the wrong copy

of a file. WinCatalog’s search tool can

locate duplicates by filename, size and

date modified – expand the Property

pane to locate it, then click the ellipsis

(...) to select other criteria to match,

such as the CRC32 checksum.

The search tool is lightning fast –

results are returned instantly, but

remember you are only working within

its catalogue, not the physical files

themselves. If you want to remove

duplicates, you’ll have to right-click each

duplicate in turn and choose ‘Open in

Explorer’ to manually delete it yourself.

Too much hassle? This is where

Duplicate Cleaner Free comes in, and

the step-by-step guide on the page

opposite reveals how to use it to weed

out and remove exact duplicates. If your

storage drive is stuffed full of similar

files – such as multiple photos that are

almost identical from your phone or

camera – then upgrade to the Pro

version for £20, or try AntiDupl (https://

sourceforge.net/projects/antidupl)

instead, which can be configured to

match similar as well as identical files.

Once you have removed unnecessary

files, you can then look to consolidate all

the ones that remain in a way that will

enable you to easily find them going

forward. If possible, store these on a

separate partition or drive to your

Windows installation, so the next time

you reinstall you don’t have to worry

about backing up and restoring your

data first – although you should still

make sure you regularly back up these

files to yet another drive for safe-

keeping – just in case you have a

problem with your PC down the road.

“One of the most important actions

when consolidating your files is to

weed out unecessary duplicates”

Consolidate your files

Take your cleaning one s tep f ur ther by reorganising and

FRQVROLGDWLQJ\RXUGDWD¾OHVWRI UHHXSV WRUDJHVSDFH

Use a tool like Simplenote to

provide a list of your drives.

WinCatalog’s search tool enables you

to find and identify duplicates quickly.