I’m trying to clean up my years of messes with personal systems. I have stacks of old drives with very old data and complete images. The first thing I did was copy them to a synology nas. Now I need to find a way to get rid of duplicates and do a reduction. I have everything from xp (possibly NT) through vista, etc. images that I will never want to rebuild. I just want to consolidate old pictures, music etc. Is there a best practice or easy way to do this?
Never used it, but recently heard of it (intending to use it soon as well, after I consolidate all my files on my NAS as well). If you are using Linux, try out czkawka, a de-duplication program written in Rust. It not only checks names and data (ie file hashes), but also checks out the files themselves, like for example pictures with different encodings.
Czkawka also has a GUI.
I never used Synology products or software, but it seems like it has an option, under: “Storage Analyzer” to create a report for “Duplicate File Candidates.” But you have to delete stuff manually.
Thanks, synology runs btrfs, I have a spare machine to spool up a linux version (generally just play with mint or ubuntu do to work- or could run a vm ) but all of the old drives are windows. Some may even go back to 98/95.