Find Duplicates with "reference" directory

Help & Support
1

I have a load of files that includes some duplicates, in a big tree of directories. I want to compare that entire tree with another, and ONLY see duplicates that are in the second tree.

In other words I don't care about duplicates in the main tree, I want to keep those. You could call it a "reference" tree, it should remain untouched. But I also want to delete anything in the second tree that is already in the first.

I am aware of this thread: Limit Find Duplicate Files to the second directory tree - #3 by Leo

The issue is that the proposed solution requires de-duplicating the reference folder, and I don't want to do that. I want to keep the dupes there.

2

You can make it only select files in (or not in) a particular folder, if that helps. The Select button in the Duplicate Files panel opens a UI for doing things like that.

(You could drag that selection to a new File Collection to get a list of only those files, for example.)

(In the selection UI, be aware that there's a difference between including a folder on its own, and including it and all children recursively. It's more obvious if you expand the tree in the UI one more level down than the selection you're making, so you can see if the child folders are also selected.)

3

Thanks Leo, that seems to do the trick. Is it possible that once selected they can be moved somewhere else, but keeping the directory tree structure intact?

4

Something like this might work:

1 Like