I am using a very old program DupKiller (last update 2007, so program is slow, and buggy) and it has a great feature and I want to know if DOpus can achieve the same functionality, whether in the same way or a different way. I often need this feature when consolidating files from various hard drives laying around and I don't want to lose any files, but can't search each directory manually because there are hundreds of them. DupKiller lets you edit its autoselection in useful ways using wildcards to do things like: compare files in D:/transferred files/storage/ and D:/storage/ and only consider them duplicates if the file name and full file path are the same other than the difference between /transferred files/storage/ and /storage.
So imagine that D:/transferred files/storage/ and D:/storage/ each have 100 subfolders and most of them have a 1kb file called thumbnails.db.
D:/transferred files/storage/aaa/thumbnails.db will be considered a duplicate of: D:/storage/aaa/thumbnails.db but will NOT match: D:/transferred files/storage/zzz/thumbnails.db and will NOT match: D:/storage/zzz/thumbnails.db
It also lets the user use wildcards similarly for autoselecting files in certain folders. I know that DOpus selects the top file in each matching group and can select the others, and I know that sorting the matching groups by different criteria can change which files are selected, but what about the scenario described above? Thanks!
That's more like what the Sync tool does than the Duplicate Finder tool.
If the aim is to consolidate all that data from old HDDs into one new, larger HDD while skipping duplicates, then you could do that trivially using a normal file copy, without even using the Sync tool.
If there is a better way to consolidate files between drives, I'm all ears. To do that trivially using normal file copy, would I need to know which folders correspond to which on each drive? Often I have lots of nested folders and I don't remember where I stored various things, so I am relying on DupKiller to reveal which folders correspond to which, and then I select the matching files to delete.
Also, the duplicates usually match name and size but not date. How would I use normal file copy in that case?
If you don't know the source and destination starting points then I don't understand how your original question could have worked, since you wouldn't know which pairs of folders to consider identical at the start of each path. (i.e. Where to anchor or start the comparison on each drive.)
You can run the Duplicate Finder across multiple drives to find duplicates by name/size and then do the copy afterwards. Or you can do the copy and run the Duplicate Finder on the results to clean things up. I think those are your only options if the files/folders are in random places.
I'm sure my inquiry seems strange or disorganized, but truthfully I have many drives from past years that I haven't dealt with, and I know the general source/destination overlaps, but I am relying on the program to help me find that a set of files is on one drive in "financial/2001/bankA/taxes" and on another drive in "bankA/financial/taxes/2001". So I have dozens of folders and subfolders organized like this with similar folder names but organized in different ways, and I'm trying to avoid tracking down all of the duplicate files manually.