Mac Washing Machine is easy to use: Launch the app, click Duplicates, and then click the big blue button. The other tool, called Duplicate Zapper, is a utility available from the Mac App Store, and simply scans for duplicate files and lets you choose which ones to delete. Mac Washing Machine, available on its own or as part of Intego’s Mac Premium Bundle X8, reclaims space on your Mac’s drives, scans and removes duplicate files, and organizes your Desktop, Dock, and files. Intego offers two tools for scanning and culling duplicate files. The following guide will explain to you in simple terms how to remove duplicate files on Mac OS X. If you have duplicate music files in your iTunes library, this can be annoying when you search for music and create playlists.įor these reasons, it’s a good idea to search for and cull duplicate files. If you use Spotlight to search for it, and you have duplicates, you may not be able to tell the most recent version of the file. Say you need to find a spreadsheet with your company’s latest budget. If you run regular backups-as you should-you may be copying files you don’t need to, and needlessly filling up your Time Machine drive. If you’re using a Mac with an SSD, you probably don’t have a lot of space to spare, so getting rid of duplicates can make your Mac happy. Especially if they are audio or video files, they can use up space on your drive. Or, you may have transferred photos from your camera, and stored them in a folder, but also added them to your Photos library.ĭuplicate files can cause problems. Or, you may store certain files you’re working on in a folder, and then move them to an archive folder when a project is completed, but not delete the originals. And then later you may have forgotten you moved them and place them in a different location. You may have downloaded some files and moved them to an external drive, but not deleted them from your Downloads folder. (Technically, this isn’t true, because Time Machine uses hard links to indicate duplicate files, rather than storing multiple copies, but if you were to search a Time Machine drive for duplicates, these hard links would look like duplicate files.)Īccidental duplicates are the files that you don’t know are on your computer and can be located in more than one place. It contains copies of all your files backed up many times. The same thing is true with a Time Machine backup. Most of the files have the same name in each backup, but these are technically not duplicates, since some of the more recent files are different from the older ones. For example, I download a full backup of my website regularly, and one of my external drives holds these backups. Intentional duplicates may be different versions of the same file, or multiple backups of your files. And some of your personal files may actually be in your Library folder this includes your email messages and their attachments, for example.Īmong these millions of files, your Mac may contain many duplicate files, and there are two types of duplicates: intentional duplicates and accidental duplicates. Most of the files you’ve created are in your Documents folder, or in other media-specific folders inside your home folder: Music, Pictures, or Movies. Most of them are system files, preference files, bits of applications (an OS X application is actually a bundle, or a sort of folder containing thousands of files), and more. Naturally, you haven’t created all those files. You can see this number on your Mac by opening Disk Utility (which is in your /Applications/Utilities folder), selecting your drive, and then clicking the Info button in the Disk Utility toolbar-then scroll down to the File Count entry. Your Mac is full of files: big ones, small ones documents, music files, photos, videos, and system files. A quick check of my iMac’s 256 GB SSD shows that it contains more than 60 million files. How To + Recommended Removing Duplicate Files on Mac OS X: The Complete Guide
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