开云体育

ctrl + shift + ? for shortcuts
© 2025 Groups.io
  1. Macsupportcentral
  2. Topics

Duplicate file finder

 

Hi everyone,

Can someone please point me in the direction of a software utility that can compare files over multiple drives so they can be consolidated onto one computer? I don’t mind paying for it.

The back story is I have eight drives from various computers I’ve had over the years. I have an old iMac that has a hybrid drive. One of the drives failed years ago and I attempted to rescue it with Stellar before taking it to Apple for repair. All it did was capture my folder structure with all the files listed, but the majority of the newer files were corrupted. It is a daunting process to get the files back. I have recently purchased a new iMac with the intentions of getting all the old files on there. Photos, videos, documents, the usual stuff. The drives that I used for back-up have also failed, so once I get this all sorted out, I plan to get a back-up redundancy plan going. For now it will be a lot of digging, and to do it manually feels overwhelming. I’m using a Zilke device for reading the old drives and that seems to be doing a decent job, but many of the files with the newest dates are corrupted and cant be opened.

Thanks in advance. I know this is a total mess of a situation and I expect it to take a long time to recover.

Steve
 

开云体育

Hello Steve

I was intrigued by your message and ended up watching this YT video:- ??


However you go about GETTING your data, I’d recommend that you put it into the iCloud and then download it onto your new iMac.

Apple computer users can also use Microsoft's One Drive Cloud storage.
Currently, 15GB of storage is available free of charge. Additional storage is available at quite reasonable cost.

Good luck! ?

David




On 22 Feb 2025, at 20:33, Steve Parmley via groups.io <rushtofire@...> wrote:

Hi everyone,

Can someone please point me in the direction of a software utility that can compare files over multiple drives so they can be consolidated onto one computer? I don’t mind paying for it.

The back story is I have eight drives from various computers I’ve had over the years. I have an old iMac that has a hybrid drive. One of the drives failed years ago and I attempted to rescue it with Stellar before taking it to Apple for repair. All it did was capture my folder structure with all the files listed, but the majority of the newer files were corrupted. It is a daunting process to get the files back. I have recently purchased a new iMac with the intentions of getting all the old files on there. Photos, videos, documents, the usual stuff. The drives that I used for back-up have also failed, so once I get this all sorted out, I plan to get a back-up redundancy plan going. For now it will be a lot of digging, and to do it manually feels overwhelming. I’m using a Zilke device for reading the old drives and that seems to be doing a decent job, but many of the files with the newest dates are corrupted and cant be opened.

Thanks in advance. I know this is a total mess of a situation and I expect it to take a long time to recover.

Steve





 

开云体育

HI

Does this fit your requirements?





On Feb 22, 2025, at 12:33?PM, Steve Parmley via groups.io <rushtofire@...> wrote:

Hi everyone,

Can someone please point me in the direction of a software utility that can compare files over multiple drives so they can be consolidated onto one computer? I don’t mind paying for it.

The back story is I have eight drives from various computers I’ve had over the years. I have an old iMac that has a hybrid drive. One of the drives failed years ago and I attempted to rescue it with Stellar before taking it to Apple for repair. All it did was capture my folder structure with all the files listed, but the majority of the newer files were corrupted. It is a daunting process to get the files back. I have recently purchased a new iMac with the intentions of getting all the old files on there. Photos, videos, documents, the usual stuff. The drives that I used for back-up have also failed, so once I get this all sorted out, I plan to get a back-up redundancy plan going. For now it will be a lot of digging, and to do it manually feels overwhelming. I’m using a Zilke device for reading the old drives and that seems to be doing a decent job, but many of the files with the newest dates are corrupted and cant be opened.

Thanks in advance. I know this is a total mess of a situation and I expect it to take a long time to recover.

Steve





 

开云体育

David,

Thanks for the link. I’m looking forward to seeing what it says. I can say that the Zilke device does read the files and has allowed me to copy and paste between drives. They were all functional drives that I removed from old computers. I wasn’t aware Zilke was claiming that they could recover from dead drives. That would be a very suspicious claim indeed.

Also thanks for the suggestion of iCloud and One Drive. I might even use DropBox for that too. LOTS of files!

Steve


On Feb 22, 2025, at 3:24?PM, David G Brooks via groups.io <davidandtrishab@...> wrote:

Hello Steve

I was intrigued by your message and ended up watching this YT video:- ??


However you go about GETTING your data, I’d recommend that you put it into the iCloud and then download it onto your new iMac.

Apple computer users can also use Microsoft's One Drive Cloud storage.
Currently, 15GB of storage is available free of charge. Additional storage is available at quite reasonable cost.

Good luck! ?

David




On 22 Feb 2025, at 20:33, Steve Parmley via groups.io <rushtofire@...> wrote:

Hi everyone,

Can someone please point me in the direction of a software utility that can compare files over multiple drives so they can be consolidated onto one computer? I don’t mind paying for it.

The back story is I have eight drives from various computers I’ve had over the years. I have an old iMac that has a hybrid drive. One of the drives failed years ago and I attempted to rescue it with Stellar before taking it to Apple for repair. All it did was capture my folder structure with all the files listed, but the majority of the newer files were corrupted. It is a daunting process to get the files back. I have recently purchased a new iMac with the intentions of getting all the old files on there. Photos, videos, documents, the usual stuff. The drives that I used for back-up have also failed, so once I get this all sorted out, I plan to get a back-up redundancy plan going. For now it will be a lot of digging, and to do it manually feels overwhelming. I’m using a Zilke device for reading the old drives and that seems to be doing a decent job, but many of the files with the newest dates are corrupted and cant be opened.

Thanks in advance. I know this is a total mess of a situation and I expect it to take a long time to recover.

Steve






 

On Feb 22, 2025, at 12:33 PM, Steve Parmley via groups.io <rushtofire@...> wrote:

Can someone please point me in the direction of a software utility that can compare files over multiple drives so they can be consolidated onto one computer?
I don’t know if this program has all of the functionality that you need. But because it is free, it might be worth checking out:

DupeGuru (free)

(Finds duplicate files by either name or content. Also works with music and photos. Uses fuzzy logic to find duplicates that don’t have precisely the same name.)



__________________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Essential But Hard To Find Macintosh Software and Advice

__________________________________________________

 

Not sure if this will do what you want. ?I have documents in three different places that get edited independently and so get out of sync. ?To get the same set of docs in all three places, and all the same versions, I use FreeFileSync. ?With the free version, ?you do it in pairs. You can tell it to make one of the two sources complete, or to mirror the pairs, so they are both complete. ?All it is doing is looking at the names of the files in the two locations and keeping the most recent of each file. ?There is a Terminal command that does the same thing if you are confident enough to use it. ?

 

The best and not presently available for modern OS'es was FileBuddy which give multiple methods to search and compare drives, folders, etc. ?

1 - 7 of 7