Spring cleaning tips

Though great plans were afoot over the weekend for various activities in the city it all fell through in the end in a fit of apathy and I ended up doing some much needed spring cleaning of the computer having scattered all the photos from Japan in a swathe of directories, some backed-up, some not, along with collections of papers and music in various degrees of replication. Anyway, this fact isn't so interesting but I found a couple of useful programs for anyone trying to consolidate files on their computer:

The first is Dump3 which can be used to find duplicate files on a computer by comparing the content, not the size and name, including music and picture files. You can set the criteria for a match manually allowing for similar but not exact copies of the same tune to be found. For pictures and music it takes a while but for pdf documents it's pretty snappy.

The second program is Foldersync which allows you to take two folders, searches for their differences and can copy and delete content accordingly. Useful if you have a backup of an old folder which has had a few changes made to it, including having changed the structure. These two programs together have let me get rid of a lot of duplicate files while making sure that I have everything backed up without replication.