Forum Discussion
deleting duplicate files the same
I had an ASUS puter crash and lost many files. A tech guy got many of them back. Meanwhile I bought an HP, but still have both. I transferred many files into the new HP. They both have terrabyte HDs. I also have a remote Seagate terrabyte drive as BU.
When I looked at Tools in CC-leaner, I discovered that I have hundreds of duplicate files. The paths are exactly the same in many of them. I want to know if I look at them and there is no differences, can I delete, say 19 of 20 safely? I think there are about a thousand in there, text, pictures etc.
The names, creation dates and sizes are identical in the paths. URLs?
Because the HDs are big I could live with them but the waste bugs me.
2 Replies
Since you mentioned the files have the same path, name, size, and creation date, chances are they're identical. But to be super sure, some tools like CC1eaner or specialized duplicate finders can compare file hashes (like MD5 or SHA-1) to confirm they are exact copies.
Quickly find and delete duplicate files with PowerShell commands:
Get-ChildItem -Path "Destination Folder Path" -Recurse | Group-Object Length,Name | Where-Object { $_.Count -gt 1 } | ForEach-Object { $_.Group | Select-Object -Skip 1 | Remove-Item -Verbose }
It is recommended to run a simulation with the -WhatIf parameter to confirm the result before execution.
