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Forum Discussion
How can I detect duplicate files and folders in 10 TB of data?
Duplicate Files & Folders - I desperately need help!
I have been with Dropbox for 15 years probably almost from day one. I have been syncing folders between Dropbox, Google Drive and my Synology Servers for several years now too. And because of this, I have thousands and thousands of duplicate files. It's certainly not all Dropbox's fault, in fact, drop box has been by far the best cloud storage system I have ever used, but somewhere along the way my folders and files have been duplicating and duplicating again, so many times now I couldn't even begin to count.
Long story, short is that I have about 15 or 16 TB worth of data right now on Dropbox, & my guess is that at least 10 of these TB's are duplicate folders/files. I have spent countless hours days weeks in a futile attempt to delete the duplicates. I have spent years desperately trying to get everything organized. But I feel like it's only gotten worse. And at this point, I'm just beside myself I don't even know what to do anymore.
Google Drive also has about the 15 TBS in it. About a month and a half ago I used an app called Filerev to mass delete duplicate files and folders in Drive. Filerev was also supposed to remove empty folders. Neither solution worked. In fact, file river pretty much just moved all of my files to my Google Drive trash folder. And, what's worse is that because Google Drive permanently deletes items that are in your trash folder after 30 days, my files are getting permanently deleted, more each day. I guess I should temporarily turn off the sync between Google Drive and Dropbox until I get this straightened out. I am going to do that right now.
I'm looking for any advice at this point. Obviously I need to remove these duplicate files/folders ASAP. It's impossible to find anything. It's a total mess. I've got multiple files with the same names that have been edited at different times and are located in completely different folders. Ugh. It's just too much for any one person to even think about fixing manually, which is the only solution Dropbox has ever offered me.
Does anyone know of an app that might actually work? I am open to any and all solutions. If anyone knows anything that I can do to fix this, I would be eternally grateful.
Thanks in advance... Maureen
- Jay
Dropbox Staff
Hi toofast, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
Currently, there isn't a feature to detect duplicates in your Dropbox account online.
However, there should be other apps and services that can detect duplicate files, after connecting to your Dropbox account.
I'll leave this thread open for other users to comment their suggestions.
Hi Jay, thanks for your response. Do you have any suggestions on apps or services that I could try?
