"Find Duplicates" improvement suggestion

Discussion in 'Parallels Toolbox Feature Suggestions' started by CaeH, Apr 25, 2020.

  1. CaeH

    CaeH Bit poster

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    Dear Parallels,
    Your toolbox has been around in my systems for more than 3+years but I never explored any of its feature up until recently, when I do an update on Parallels Desktop, a message telling me that I may need to check Toolbox for any updates manually ... then I finally peep into Toolbox more detailed.

    I am impressed with its functionalities. Simple and powerful small tools in your Toolbox.

    I have tried the "Find Duplicates" as my Macbook Pro is a customised laptop with 512 GB of storage and 16MB of RAM, over the years of using the notebook, many files on my projects and backups may have duplications. I dig in by using your TOOLBOX "Find Duplicates" on the who storage of "Macintosh HD".

    The results are astonishing, it managed to scan the whole storage and has 24000++ files of over 59GB duplicates... almost 60GB i can save!! I am impressed!!
    Here's the problem... it also digged into some projects folder in the storage, some of those in different folder are backups in TAR ball of an active project and and another duplicates are the folder of what I am working actively... yes, indeed those image files and video files etc. are duplicates, but if I removed them, my future upload to my online web server may have missing files and I need to search and recreate them....

    So, I have sort the results of "Find Duplicates" by sorting into TYPE and then scanned thru with my own eyes, one by one... YES almost 25k files , i scanned one by one... more than 2 hours it took me... then somehow, your FIND Duplicates suddenly exit from the screen... force quit happened.... all those reselection for deletes are gone... 2hours of hardwork... I redo again once more patiently this time, by trying not to view the videos or files etc. just select them... fear it could be too huge memory for Fin Duplicates software to handle and my 16GB not enough... I don't know what went wrong but second time, i do it very carefully.

    And finally, I managed to screen until the last file. Press Move TO TRASH... I thought it will work like magic, nope ... it's not... I waited for more than 4 hours, the process of moving to trash is still running, and I have checked the "BIN", there are about 8800 files inside the BIN, I thought it could be 60GB too large for the BIN to handle, I remove and clear my BIN to zero. Waited another 2 hours, nothing happened. No new deleted files in BIN , the BIN is still zero files. Which means, the FIND DUPLICATES process is stalled... I don't know why... Well ok... time wasted.. where tools is suppose to help and assist human... I am busy and frustrated... I work till 4am in the wee hours... gotta wake up 7am to work.

    Here is my suggestion:
    Please tweak the FIND DUPLICATES tool to search the whole MACINTOSH HD by having a window to allow user to search all of the DRIVE but sort the type and let user to easily select those that are in which folder or which type, in my case... those HTML files, images of projects of backup etc. aren't for delete... and by viewing and picking /selecting them not to remove, one by one... is very tedious.... let user do it by batch after sorting to select batch of delete everything (even duplicate) OR not to delete everything (for certain folder and types) .... well, I know I can Find Duplicates at start by NOT selecting the project folders, but somehow, over the years of working on my laptop... duplicates are everywhere... and I found that searching the whole HD is the best. Thank You.
     
    RonT1, ThomasG32 and ScottM28 like this.
  2. ThomasG32

    ThomasG32 Bit poster

    Messages:
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    ENHANCEMENT REQUEST

    I would like to see the option in the Find Duplicates tool to not just delete the duplicate files but have the option to replace the duplicate with an "alias" or archive them as an earlier version in case you don't want them updated with future changes.
     
  3. ScottM28

    ScottM28

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    I've got a bunch of mp3 files that I know are duplicates of some others in my Music folder. When I run the application to find duplicates, everything except the file name, the application works fine.

    The problem I have is I've changed some of the mp3 metadata, so I actually do have duplicates of the music files except with different meta.

    I'd like to see the application offer a choice to run the duplicate finder with the meta data stripped out so I can concentrate on the Contents of the file.

    This same idea should also apply to JPGs, Word Docs, etc.
     
  4. ScottM28

    ScottM28

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    0
    I have a bunch of mp3 files that I want to compare to the ones in my Music folder. I've copied the 'extra' files to a temp folder and used the duplicate file finder to look for duplicates.

    Right now I can only select the older or newer of the files. I'd like to be able to select all the ones in the Temp folder that are duplicates of my Music folder for deletion. That way, all the remaining files in the Temp folder mean I don't have copies of them yet and can then shift them to the Music folder.

    There's no preview option either.
     
  5. GuentherW1

    GuentherW1 Bit poster

    Messages:
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    on my windows pc i can open only the personal user folder and it's sub folders. can this be changed to any location? or do i have to create shortcuts to get around that?
     

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