Hash Database For Offline Duplicate Cleaning
Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2016 5:16 am
First I want to take a moment to congratulate the digitalvolcano team (however many that is) for what I believe is the best duplicate checking software ever on the market. As a bit of an aficionado of this category for many years, I have to say that your software is the most powerful I have ever seen (except for one feature that I will get to in a moment). Especially impressive is the Status, Protected, Master, Scan Again, Find uniques, Scan subfolders options, not only for the innovative nature of a few of these, but also for the beautiful way they are implemented. It's truly brilliant!
I thought I would rehash (if you will excuse my pun) a feature that I have suggested a couple of times in the past with the hope that it might now be something that could put on the feature list if you are looking for more innovative new features to add. There have been very few duplicate finders I know of that ever had this feature, I am only aware of two. I think I may have actually sent you the trial version of one of them a couple of years ago when we initially discussed it via email.
Here is what I am talking about.
Currently, you can only add paths to the "Folders to search" list if the storage device with the folder is actually attached to your computing device.
But what if you could add virtual storage devices that represent files that are not physically attached? That way you could dupe "live" files against files that are not currently present, or even "offline" files against other offline files and generate a list of duplicates (or if you want to dream of really far out stuff, generate an executable that you could run on the remote storage device to delete the duplicate files... just dreaming :)
Think of it... you could dupe against zillions of files and you don't even need to have the actual files present. What you have instead is a database of their hashes.
So DCP would allow you to create named databases of file hashes (containing say filename, date, size and hash... for my taste an SQLite database would be awesome). For example you could have a database of files stored on a DVD called "My Vacation Photos." Then you could load and unload the named databases in the same way you include a path in the "Folders to search" pane and use them the same way you use the live files. But you don't even need to have the media they are stored on it attached! It's a virtual path. So in the example, you could say, delete any duplicate files on your attached hard drive that you already have on the "My Vacation Photos" DVD. And you don't even have to connect the DVD!
Of course some actions would not be possible such as fuzzy image searches and some of the options would not be applicable ... and I know it is a huge task to implement this. But I think the immense power this gives you would take DCP to the next level! I hope you agree!
Thanks again for considering it. I can't even begin to tell you how useful this would be for me. And I'm hoping others can see the value in it for their own use as well.
I thought I would rehash (if you will excuse my pun) a feature that I have suggested a couple of times in the past with the hope that it might now be something that could put on the feature list if you are looking for more innovative new features to add. There have been very few duplicate finders I know of that ever had this feature, I am only aware of two. I think I may have actually sent you the trial version of one of them a couple of years ago when we initially discussed it via email.
Here is what I am talking about.
Currently, you can only add paths to the "Folders to search" list if the storage device with the folder is actually attached to your computing device.
But what if you could add virtual storage devices that represent files that are not physically attached? That way you could dupe "live" files against files that are not currently present, or even "offline" files against other offline files and generate a list of duplicates (or if you want to dream of really far out stuff, generate an executable that you could run on the remote storage device to delete the duplicate files... just dreaming :)
Think of it... you could dupe against zillions of files and you don't even need to have the actual files present. What you have instead is a database of their hashes.
So DCP would allow you to create named databases of file hashes (containing say filename, date, size and hash... for my taste an SQLite database would be awesome). For example you could have a database of files stored on a DVD called "My Vacation Photos." Then you could load and unload the named databases in the same way you include a path in the "Folders to search" pane and use them the same way you use the live files. But you don't even need to have the media they are stored on it attached! It's a virtual path. So in the example, you could say, delete any duplicate files on your attached hard drive that you already have on the "My Vacation Photos" DVD. And you don't even have to connect the DVD!
Of course some actions would not be possible such as fuzzy image searches and some of the options would not be applicable ... and I know it is a huge task to implement this. But I think the immense power this gives you would take DCP to the next level! I hope you agree!
Thanks again for considering it. I can't even begin to tell you how useful this would be for me. And I'm hoping others can see the value in it for their own use as well.