Folder overlap

SilentGuy · Post by **SilentGuy** » Tue Jul 27, 2010 12:55 pm

Another idea of mine: It would be nice if there was something like "folder similarity" instead of just file similarity.
e.g. I would like to quickly see if one folder contains exactly the same files as another folder and maybe even if one folder is a subset of another folder. that would help identify which folder to delete or how to merge folders.

Fool4UAnyway · Post by **Fool4UAnyway** » Tue Jul 27, 2010 9:01 pm

This is a little more complex. Perhaps it would not be so hard to look for a Directory Comparison tool that does just (about) that.

SilentGuy · Post by **SilentGuy** » Wed Jul 28, 2010 10:11 pm

I was aware that this is rather complex, but I thought I'd just put it out there

Do you know any tool to do this? I don't, that's why I proposed it.

Fool4UAnyway · Post by **Fool4UAnyway** » Wed Jul 28, 2010 11:06 pm

It's possible with WinMerge, an open source File and Directory Comparison tool:

http://winmerge.org
http://winmerge.org/docs/tour/#tour_comparingdirs

I use ExamDiff Pro myself, but this is commercial software. If you want to pay for it, it certainly is worth the money.

SV · Post by SV » Sat Aug 14, 2010 6:46 pm

The issue that duplicate cleaner solves is FINDING duplicates - winmerge etc allow you to compare two selected directories - ie you need to know the duplicated directories. What I and silentguy are asking for is an aggregation tool- I have 2300 files(500 groups). It would be nice if the duplicates were grouped by directory

Fool4UAnyway · Post by **Fool4UAnyway** » Sat Aug 14, 2010 9:19 pm

At least looking at the scanning results of Duplicate Cleaner would give a pretty good indication of whether specific directories are duplicates of one another.

How would you group duplicates by directory?

SilentGuy · Post by **SilentGuy** » Sun Aug 15, 2010 6:39 pm

Grouping by folder seems pretty impossible as every duplicate-group can be connected to multiple folders...

In another thread I proposed the ability to filter the current results... With this, you would in theory be able to say something like "show all duplicate sets that involve folder X"... that might be a kind of grouping...

the only other thing I could think about would be to run lots of different set theory algorithms on the results, to get information like "folder a is a subset of folder b",
"folders a,b, and c all share duplicates, but are disjunct from folders d and e, which only share duplicates with each other"...
But I guess that would be rather complex because even if it was easy to implement (which I doubt) it would also create lot's of cases that might be confusing to the user...

DV · Post by DV » Mon Aug 16, 2010 1:01 pm

I was planning a Dupe folder browser for v2.0, but it is on hold for now as I haven't got the time. Version 2 does have some new right-click operations which work by folder. These do help when trying to eliminate entire duplicate folder trees.