I want to create a catalog of all my drives and be able to use that catalog to compare them for duplicate files. Can ExamDiff Pro do this? Is ExamDiff Pro the best software to do this or do I need to buy WinCatalog or abeMedia as well? I would rather do it all in ExamDiff Pro.
If ExamDiff Pro can create catalogs then how do I do this and how do I compare them to find duplicate files? I want to be able to compare all my drives without needing to connect them to my Win10 computer. Any help and advice about the best way to catalog drives appreciated.
Cataloging Drives
Re: Cataloging Drives
No, ExamDiff Pro is not suitable for this. It can't catalog and it doesn't find duplicates.
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PrestoSoft
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Re: Cataloging Drives
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JeremyNicoll
- Expert Member
- Posts: 108
- Joined: Sun May 02, 2010 12:00 pm
- Location: Edinburgh
Re: Cataloging Drives
Nirsoft (who have lots of very good utlity programs) have a free file search tool which can find duplicate files in various ways. See:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/search_my_files.html
though note that this program doesn't do file hashing to decide if two files are equal, but instead a byte-by-byte comparison.
However you can choose which folders to point the tool at, and limit its search to - for example - files in a particular size range. If eg you look first for potential duplicates that are, maybe, bigger than 50 MB, the number of files found will probably be pretty small, so who cares if those that have the exact same size do get somewhat slowly compared with each other. Next time try files of eg 45-49.99 MB, and so on.
I've also used my main file search utility which is Mythicsoft's File Locator Pro. One of its options is to look for files whose hash value is something, or contains something (eg an MD5 value for a file might be "371b8f8deaadddbe4c2fe291e456e97b" so I think you could find that looking just for "e4c2fe" if that made any sense). Obviously to do that it has to hash every file that its other search criteria have limited its search to. If instead one asks it to find only the files whose hash contain ":" it will report the hash value of every file that the other criteria limited the search to - because when it has done the hash (which incidentally can be some or all of several types of hash) it will find ":" in a string like
MD5:371b8f8deaadddbe4c2fe291e456e97b
You can export the list of files found, or also the list of files found and their contents (which in this case means their hashes) to a flat file. No doubt other search utilities will do the same thing, but this is the one I know best.
If you sort the exported list of filenames/paths on the columns that contain the hash values, you will find that all files with the same hash are
listed neext to each other in that sorted file. (Being able to sort a file like that probably needs you to have access to a programmer's text editor, or a sort utility - maybe even the SORT command - see output from: sort /? in a command window - or you might need to load the list of files etc into a spreadsheet...
Finding the sets of lines which all have the same hash is also easy with a decent text editor (since looking for, or eliminating duplicate lines in a
file is a common task). Whether this approach would help you though is going to depend on the tools you have at hand.
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/search_my_files.html
though note that this program doesn't do file hashing to decide if two files are equal, but instead a byte-by-byte comparison.
However you can choose which folders to point the tool at, and limit its search to - for example - files in a particular size range. If eg you look first for potential duplicates that are, maybe, bigger than 50 MB, the number of files found will probably be pretty small, so who cares if those that have the exact same size do get somewhat slowly compared with each other. Next time try files of eg 45-49.99 MB, and so on.
I've also used my main file search utility which is Mythicsoft's File Locator Pro. One of its options is to look for files whose hash value is something, or contains something (eg an MD5 value for a file might be "371b8f8deaadddbe4c2fe291e456e97b" so I think you could find that looking just for "e4c2fe" if that made any sense). Obviously to do that it has to hash every file that its other search criteria have limited its search to. If instead one asks it to find only the files whose hash contain ":" it will report the hash value of every file that the other criteria limited the search to - because when it has done the hash (which incidentally can be some or all of several types of hash) it will find ":" in a string like
MD5:371b8f8deaadddbe4c2fe291e456e97b
You can export the list of files found, or also the list of files found and their contents (which in this case means their hashes) to a flat file. No doubt other search utilities will do the same thing, but this is the one I know best.
If you sort the exported list of filenames/paths on the columns that contain the hash values, you will find that all files with the same hash are
listed neext to each other in that sorted file. (Being able to sort a file like that probably needs you to have access to a programmer's text editor, or a sort utility - maybe even the SORT command - see output from: sort /? in a command window - or you might need to load the list of files etc into a spreadsheet...
Finding the sets of lines which all have the same hash is also easy with a decent text editor (since looking for, or eliminating duplicate lines in a
file is a common task). Whether this approach would help you though is going to depend on the tools you have at hand.