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Comment by vinaypai | Hacker News Reader

"Finding and removing duplicate files has long been one of the mainstays of Mac housekeeping."

What are Mac users doing that makes finding and removing duplicate files such a regular task? I don't use a Mac, but I can honestly say I've never given second thought to duplicate files. I'm sure there are some here and there but my hard drive isn't filling up with duplicates of large files.

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I do use a Mac. We spend a lot of time on maintenance. Here's my Saturday schedule:

* 7:00 AM find and remove duplicate files

* 8:00 AM reorganize the 2D layout of file icons within folders for maximum visual pleasure

* 9:00 degauss the LCD (really frustrated that you need third party software for this since the CRT days)

* 10:00 find and remove duplicate files

And so on. Finding duplicate files is just as essential as monitor degaussing, but you won't find this listed in the manual. You have to go to user forms where people will convince you of the need and get you to adopt procedures like the above to keep your machine at top performance.

Heheh, don’t forget to reset the SMC, it collects too much entropy overnight so if you want deterministic behaviour you’ll need to make sure to dump its contents to /dev/null.

You can also make your database persist writes to /dev/null, it will make performance go through the roof

Then you are going to need my app Dr. DevNull. It keeps your /dev/null clean and tuned for high performance writes. Only $5/mo. Upgrade to Dr. DevNull Pro to keep backups of everything written to /dev/null. Dr. DevNull Enterprise has all that plus SSO.

If you're not rebuilding the desktop every other day you're really missing out!

I used to habitually hop from one Linux distro to another, and I was often rebuilding my desktop every other day.

Learned a ton about distros, backups, treating machines as disposable, configuration management and scripting the desktop setup though. It wasn't completely wasted.

Just install Gentoo

Interesting, that's one distribution I have not tried. However, searching for a degaussing package comes up empty:

https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/search?q=Degauss

Until gentoo has this, I'm not sure if it's ready for the desktop. Maybe next year?

You don't need a fucking app, just echo full | sudo tee /sys/class/drm/drm1/i2c/00/power/degauss like a normal person.

Good point, I can add this to my bi-hourly disk cache flushing + cache algorithm rotation routine since I'm already on the terminal.

How do you ever find time to record a video of yourself on a white background talking about how much better you are than PC users? ;)

I have a few Linux boxes which let me regain some productivity.

There’s nothing special about Macs or Mac users, this article is just in a Mac-focused blog, so it’s not implying anything about other OSes. Deduping is a mainstay of computer housekeeping on any OS, for some people, though maybe not you. There are lots of workflows that end up with duplicates, but certainly not everyone uses them.

Here are just a few ways I’ve ended up with enough dupes to want to dedupe, which has happened on Windows and Linux for me as frequently as on Mac: Backing up mobile phones, using version control for multiple repositories that share files, losing access to repository servers and archiving or backup up the files, forking an old archived folder and making modifications to it that I want to keep, not to mention homegrown schemes & scripts for archiving and backing up when I either don’t want to pay for backup software or can’t even find anything appropriate to all my needs (cross platform, saving to a NAS, shared with my family, etc.)

Yeah, as someone who sometimes uses macOS, I was confused by this initially but I believe you have the right interpretation.

If I had to guess, it might have to do with the Mac standard of “save on close window” which is a vestige of an old apple desktop metaphor where every window represents a file somewhere.

So you end up with a lot of duplicates from either trying to edit a read only document in some apps (which spawns an editable copy) or accidentally hitting duplicate (generate a copy of the current file in the same directory) which is the mac equivalent of “Save As”. It’s on you the user to move the new file where you want it.

I think a simple explanation could be that it is slightly harder (mentally) to move than copy a file. Windows move: ctrl + x Mac: cmd + option + v In every other program, cut/paste is the same as windows. That’s confusing - at least as a former Windows user. That said, I had many duplicate files on Windows too.

Dragging from one folder into another is also a copy operation on MacOS instead of a move like it is on Windows.

Both Macs and Windows have dragging and dropping from one folder to another on the same disk as a move, while dragging and dropping to a different disk is a copy.

Not sure why I thought it was a copy!

It defaults to a copy when dragging to external drives (holding command makes it a move)

Dragging from one folder into another is also a copy operation on MacOS instead of a move like it is on Windows.

Only if the destination is on a different volume. Like from a hard disk to a USB drive.

Hold down the Command key while dragging a file between volumes if you really want Move instead of Copy.

One of the biggest ones from past days was media files and especially photos. They are large, users like to arrange/rearrange, compress, and manually back them up (or “back them up” depending on the knowledge level of the user). They are also rarely modified after being initially tweaked.

And on the other side: Apple computers typically don’t have upgradeable hard drives so for anyone who takes photos/video it’s an inevitable countdown to zero free space.

Space is precious! Soldered SSDs can't be replaced, so we are stuck with the size we could afford at the time we bought our MacBooks.

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