Mark Duplicate Files panel

To bring up the mark duplicate files panel, select a folder in the folder browser, and then use the mark duplicate files command.

When the mark duplicate files panel appears, the selected folder is shown at the top of the panel. To change the selected folder, close down the panel, select a new folder, and then use the mark duplicate files command again. You can not simply type a new selected folder path into the panel itself.

The mark duplicate files panel provides a way to mark duplicate files so that all copies of a file can not be marked. This makes it easy to delete redundant copies of a file without accidentally deleting all copies of a file. There are a number of options to allow you to set which of the duplicate files is not marked.

• Mark duplicate files inside selected folder except newest

  This option marks all duplicate files inside the selected folder (or any subfolder), except the file in each set of duplicate files that has the newest modification time. If more than one of the duplicate files have the newest modification time, then it will be arbitrary which of them is not marked.

• Mark duplicate files inside selected folder except oldest

  This option marks all duplicate files inside the selected folder (or any subfolder), except the file in each set of duplicate files that has the oldest modification time.

• Mark duplicate files inside selected folder, which have a copy outside

  This option marks all duplicate files inside the selected folder (or any subfolder), provided they have at least one copy outside the selected folder. This is useful if you want to delete a folder and be sure that you still have copies of all the files it contains elsewhere on the system.

• Mark duplicate files outside selected folder, which have a copy inside

  This option marks all duplicate files outside the selected folder, provided they have at least one copy inside the selected folder (or any subfolder). This option allows you to clean up your system so that any copies of a file are in a known folder. If you have some files that you may have several copies of in different places, you can choose one folder where you want these files to be stored. After putting one copy of these files in the chosen folder, you can use the mark duplicate files command to mark any other copies of these files anywhere else on your system (or at least, in any other folders you have scanned).

When the mark duplicate files command is selected, the first thing that happens is that all files in the selected folder are checked to see if any are duplicates. If the selected folder has not been scanned for duplicates and nor have any subfolders under it, or if no duplicate files are found, then a message box is shown. Otherwise the mark duplicate files panel appears. If the list of files shown in the mark duplicate files panel is empty, then all the duplicate files found in the selected folder only have copies that are also inside the selected folder.

The list inside the panel shows the files that will be marked if the Mark button is pressed. The list changes as you select between the different options for selecting which duplicates are marked.

Note that when the mark duplicate files panel is brought up, it does not perform any new scanning of files. You should make sure that all folders that you want to check for duplicates have already been scanned before bringing up the mark duplicate files panel. For more information on scanning for duplicate files follow this link.