How Do I Use Beyond Compare: Introduction to Beyon
  • Forty things about Beyond Compare
  • Acknowledgements
  • Learn Beyond Compare in 5 Minutes
    • Quickstart: open two directories
    • Quickstart: open two files
    • Quickstart: move a file
    • Text Compare: understand the display
    • Downloads
  • Text Compare
    • How to use Beyond Compare for Text Compare
    • In Beyond Compare, what are unimportant differences?
    • Why no word-wrap ??
    • How to use Beyond Compare to confirm 100% replacement
    • Ignore Trivial Differences, Like Timestamps
  • Git
    • How to use Beyond Compare with Git
    • Do a roll-back to peek at your old code
    • Quickstart: Folder Merge
    • Why merge three folders?
    • Beyond Compare Three-Way Folder Merge Symbols Explained
    • How to compare two commits, both old, in Git
    • Git mergetool: merging three files.
    • How to recover an older version of your code with Git and Beyond Compare
    • Peeking under the hood at how Git does its thing
    • Getting better at Git
    • Find changes since last commit
    • Patches
    • How to configure Visual Studio to use Beyond Compare for Version Control
  • Scripts and the Command Line
    • How to use Beyond Compare in the Terminal
    • How to do an automatic backup every day
    • Write a Batch File That Will Start Several Syncs Simultaneously
    • Write a batch file that will start several text compares automatically
    • TL; DR
  • Table Compare
    • Quickstart: open a couple of Excel spreadsheets
    • Example: finding missing items in a pair of spreadsheets
    • Keys
    • Mismatched Columns
    • Longer example, opening .csv files
    • How to remove columns from a spreadsheet
    • Aligned vs Unaligned
    • Example: List of City Trees
  • Sync / Folders
    • Backup your entire computer (Part One)
    • Backup your entire computer (Part Two)
    • Backup, advanced
    • RegEx Examples: Filename Alignment Overide
    • Scan a lot or a little
  • Other
    • Peek
    • Binary
    • Undo
    • Colors
    • How to compare images
    • Report: Text Compare
    • Report: Table Compare
    • Looooonnnnngggg lines...
    • Binary: How to see the 1's and 0's
    • How to write your first script
    • How to find redundant or duplicate files
    • Minor Edge Cases
    • Shortcut Key
    • How to ignore parts of your file
    • Folder System Context Menus
    • About Evan Genest
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  • Look closely at a pair of folders in the tree
  • Flatten the entire tree, ignoring folders, showing all files

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How to find redundant or duplicate files

PreviousHow to write your first scriptNextMinor Edge Cases

Last updated 6 years ago

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Here's the situation: you have stored years worth of backups and copies of your working folders. So far so good. But unfortunately you are not very systematic so you've created a mess. Some things are missing and other things have three or more copies of the same file!

But there are two useful things BC can do for you.

Look closely at a pair of folders in the tree

Using your mouse, drag both directories onto the BC window. Hit the expand button. Whoa, these backup files on the right are a mess. The files are named "a" through "i"

If we want to examine foo and bar, we rightclick them and choose set as base folder.

Flatten the entire tree, ignoring folders, showing all files

This option shows all the files, no matter how deeply buried. You can sort the flattened tree by date, size, and rightclick each file for a context menu. The screenshot here tells us four things:

  • the equals signs in the middle, with the 0111 symbol are telling us that byte for byte, the contents are identical in this pair of files

  • the directory on the right has doubles of almost everything

  • the directory on the left has no copies of file "i".

  • the path of each file is listed

Unfortunately, this is the end of the road. Beyond Compare is the wrong tool for thoroughly dealing with redundant files. If you want to methodically solve redundancy issues in backups that you have already made, search online for duplicate file finder software.

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