Noodlesoft Forums

I download a lot of articles from google scholar for my dissertation. I sometimes find myself downloading the same article multiple times; cluttering my computer.I tried my reference manager, Sente, to delete duplicates. But, Sente is not very efficient to detect duplicates. I want hazel to keep my mac clean from duplicates. Therefore, I was thinking to put my whole hard-drive as a folder into hazel and tick "throw away duplicates". My worry is it might delete the articles I read and annotated before. (I don't want hazel to delete older articles; I want it to delete the newly downloaded ones immediately as soon as they arrive in my Downloads folder).

is it safe to put my whole hard drive and ask hazel to throw away duplicates?
won't it delete the earlier ones (the ones I kept inside Sente folder)?

Do not do that. It won't do what you want. If you have Hazel monitor your downloads folders, you can set it to delete duplicates there. Note that the duplicates have to be in that same folder. Hazel will not handle duplicates across your filesystem. For that, you should look for a product specifically made for that.

there is no any application that could do such a task in the mac world right now. I have been digging all over the internet; and I have tried all the duplicate finder apps in the market. None of them has such a feature.

It would be great if Hazel could add the feature.
The point is to protect the mac from duplicates: like an antivirus; the scanning engine would immediately catch the duplicate and delete it (or ask a user input for deleting; just like the App Sweep feature of Hazel).


Thank you for the reply

How would something like this not do what you want? http://www.araxis.com/find-duplicate-files/

I don't think it's a good idea to have a program do this in general as either (a) some of the files are important and you need user input and (b) this may happen so much that it would bug the hell out of you and you'd turn it off and (c ) it would be very resource intensive and probably slow down every disk access on your system.

Mr_Noodle wrote:How would something like this not do what you want? http://www.araxis.com/find-duplicate-files/

I don't think it's a good idea to have a program do this in general as either (a) some of the files are important and you need user input and (b) this may happen so much that it would bug the hell out of you and you'd turn it off and (c ) it would be very resource intensive and probably slow down every disk access on your system.

a) I will download my important files to a different folder: or make a rule so that Hazel will not throw them away
b) proper programming of hazel will make it realistic
c) yah, I agree, this could be a problem unless the program (hazel) has a way of keeping the memory (list or cache) of the already stored files in the disk. Assume Hazel has a cache (memory) of the list of files (or their checksum) so that it will not rescan the disk every time a new file comes in. then, what hazel would do is just check if the new comer is among the list or not. she doesn't have to rescan the whole disk . (I am not programmer; sorry if this doesn't give sense : )

Keeping all that in memory would not be a good idea. Doing something like this on a continual basis will bog your system down. In any case, it's not really Hazel's thing and you are better off using some software geared specifically towards this.

I love Hazel, want to buy her flowers

apologies if this is redundant, looked around a bit and couldn't find anything on this.... would love to utilize the delete duplicates function but not clear on how it works. so I have the same question, how does throw away duplicate files work?

a description of operating parameters and priorities would help understand where and how she works for best application. eg., on my iTunes media music folder? will it delete folders of the same name irrespective of contents?will she consider modification dates, file name and size? file contents? a writeup on how this works (sticky?) would be great. any guidance is greatly appreciated!

cheers!

Search the forums and the help as I believe this is answered many times. It is meant for deleting duplicates (same content) resulting from downloading or copying it twice (similar names). It's not meant as a general de-duper. You should look into specialized software for that since you'll want it to be interactive to allow you to choose.