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Use the Duplicate Finder for Mac feature of Disk Drill to analyze your storage space for extra files that take up valuable space. Duplicate Finder can search internal and external drives to find and delete duplicate songs, videos, images, files, and documents. macOS Sequoia Ready!
It can be a real pain to manually search for wasted storage space. Storage is often wasted by holding copies of files that aren’t being used. These extra files take up valuable space and eat into your storage potential and machine efficiency. Our Duplicate File Finder makes the menial task of finding wasted storage space simple by locating duplicate files and giving you the option to automatically or manually select and delete unwanted ones.
Your Mac itself, should not duplicate files. One of the biggest causes of duplicate files is that data has been imported to your Mac more than one time. This could be because you imported the same photos more than once or copied over data and accidentally added it more than one time.
No need to worry though as this is something that we can easily fix by using the Duplicate File Finder in Disk Drill.
Duplicate data on your Mac can easily be detected and taken care of by using Disk Drill:
You can also use the Find Duplicates feature on external hard drives or SD cards. This would be useful if you’re going to import data onto your Mac. Checking the device that you’re going to import data from first could help lower the number of duplicates that you have on your Mac.
In this section we’re going to take a look at how to find and remove duplicates using a third party software option such as Disk Drill.
Disk Drill can be used to find and remove duplicate files in addition to being some of the best data recovery software that you can use. Using Disk Drill to find and remove duplicate files is also free.
Let’s start off by downloading Disk Drill. Once the file has been downloaded, head to your downloads folder and double-click the file to open it. You will then need to drag it to your Applications folder. Once you’ve installed Disk Drill, we can start looking for lost data.
After launching Disk Drill, look for the Duplicate File Finder on the left-hand side.
Next, select what folders you would like to have Disk Drill scan for duplicate files. Drag them into the Disk Drill window, and then click on Start Scan.
Wait for the Scanning Process to Complete. This can take some time depending on how much data you’re scanning.
Review the duplicates that Disk Drill was able to find. Disk Drill has a handy preview function that allows you to view what the duplicate file looks like before deleting it to help you ensure that you’re deleting the correct file.
Once you’ve reviewed and selected the files that you would like to delete, click on the Remove button in the lower right-hand corner.
You’ve now decluttered your Mac and have more storage space available
In the unfortunate event of data loss, it’s always smart to have a hard drive backup on Mac. Disk Drill is packed with features to make data management easy. It offers a handy solution for almost every situation. You can create a bootable drive for data recovery: simply connect any storage device with at least 2GB of space, then select “Create Boot Drive”. To prevent a physical failure of your storage device and increase your chances of data retrieval, Disk Drill creates byte-to-byte disk backups. Also don't forget to enable Recovery Vault or Guaranteed Recovery for your work data. Your files are important, so why not keep them safe?
While Disk Drill is one of the best methods to find and remove duplicates on your Mac, it’s helpful to also try and test other methods as this will make you a better Mac user.
Below we’re going to take a look at and explore some other options that you can use.
You can use the Mac Terminal to find duplicate files right on your Mac. This option works, but it can sometimes miss duplicates. However, if you want a purely textual-based experience then this one is for you.
cd ~/downloadsfind ./ -type f -exec md5 {} ; | awk -F '=' '{print $2 "t" $1}' | sort | tee duplicates.txt
Smart folders can be used to find duplicate files on your Mac and it’s actually quite easy to do. In this example, I’m going to search my Downloads folder for duplicate images as that is the most likely place on my Mac that would have duplicates.
You can manually go through the built-in Mac Photos app to find and remove duplicate photos. This can be quite time-consuming based on how many photos you have on your Mac.
If you’re using Apple Mail on your Mac, you can review your attachments by following the steps below. This will allow you to find duplicates and large files that could be taking up space on your Mac.
Updated on by Disk Drill Team
Follow these steps to delete duplicate files on your Mac:
Disk Drill for Mac offers free data protection and management features in its free trial version. One of these is a tool that will search selected locations on your computer for duplicate files. Disk Drill offers an intuitive and simple method of cleaning up duplicate files from your system to increase storage capacity with no financial investment in the application.
Yes, it is usually safe to delete duplicate files. You may find that you have many duplicates due to reinstalling software or generating temporary work files. There may be some instances where like-named files have been created from different apps. A safe strategy is to backup before removing duplicates in case you have removed a file that you need.
The three best duplicate file finder apps for the Mac are:
Follow this procedure to delete duplicate photos on your Mac:
You can easily find duplicate files on your Mac using a duplicate file finder tool, such as the one that’s included for free with Disk Drill:
No, your Mac doesn’t come with a built-in duplicate file finder, but there are many great third-party duplicate file finders you can choose from. Some, such as Disk Drill, are actually just an extra free feature, while others, such as Gemini, are stand-alone software applications.
The most common cause of this problem is the unintentional creation of backups. Fortunately, getting rid of unwanted duplicates can be easy—you just need to use a capable duplicate file finder software application.
To remove duplicates from your iPhoto library:
We know that your storage solutions are important to you. Storage is important to us too, which is why we created Disk Drill. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about Disk Drill, please feel free to contact our Technical Support Staff.
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Use Disk Drill 1.x-5.x for OS X 10.5+
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