You know they’re out there—whether hidden deep in the bowels of your hard drive or scattered within those boxes of floppies in your desk drawer: duplicate files, maybe even old and obsolete versions of files, disorganized, taking up valuable disk space, and generally making you feel as if you’ve lost control of your files.
Suddenly, from out of Midnight Software, comes your salvation— DupLocator, the new utility that makes it easy to locate and organize duplicate files.
Here’s how it works: DupLocator searches your disks and adds file information to a comprehensive master list. It will search all sorts of media, from hard drives and floppies to removable cartridges, tapes, and even CDs. It can handle lists of over 16 thousand files (depending on available memory), and the lists can then be used in numerous ways.
The primary function of DupLocator is, of course, to locate and delete duplicate files. You can do this in two ways—either marking the duplicates, or changing the list to show only duplicates.
Once you’ve located these useless disk-gobblers, there are a number of options available—delete them, move them, copy them, etc. After examining the dupes in order to compare dates, sizes, and locations, you’re most likely to choose to simply delete the unwanted file, but there are other options available.
Let’s say you have a large number of clip art files—including duplicates—scattered over a pile of floppies. After scanning the disks and deleting the duplicate files, you can use DupLocator’s Copy or Move commands to create a new set of disks containing an organized and alphabetized collection.
If your housekeeping chores are complex, you’ll appreciate the Batch file feature; as you locate files that you later want to Copy or Move, simply send them to the Batch window where you can collect up to 200 files for later dispensation.
DupLocator can also save and print reports that can serve as a catalog of your files. In fact, DupLocator has many more features than we can discuss in detail in this article. For instance, you can (finally) organize the coloring and labeling of icons—it’s easy to choose a group of files scattered about in different directories and/or different disks and color them all Hot Stuff or Personal.
Have lots of floppies with the same names? (“Untitled” is a favorite.) No problem. DupLocator lets you rename them on the fly, or—even better—automatically serialize their names: “Untitled 1,” “Untitled 2,” etc. DupLocator also contains an impressive set of disk and file utilities which can help with such diverse tasks as mounting SCSI devices or analyzing the contents of your disks. If you use either DiskDoubler or the StuffIt Engine, DupLocator can even open or create archives for you.
Anyone with lots of floppies and/or lots of files can benefit from DupLocator. With its help, you can regain control of your file collection.
The article above is reprinted from Mac Monitor, the newsletter of The Savannah Macintosh Users Group. It may be reprinted in a single issue of newsletters published by non-profit user groups. Payment shall consist of a single issue of the newsletter in which the article appears, sent to the following address:
