Fdupes: A tool to de-duplicate files

I personnally use fdupes.pl:

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=85202

Tested on many millions of files, works like a charm (though it can run out of memory on a 32 bits machine). I'm using the enhanced version here: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1099194 which has an autodelete flag and prudently ignore symlinks.

I personally found fdupes to be slower and more limited than dupfiles [0].

I switched to dupfiles about a year ago and haven't had any problems yet.

[0]: http://liw.fi/dupfiles/

I used this when I was working on a product that used automated tests to upload files repeatedly during the day. The volume of test files was so great that it continually put pressure on the storage -- more pressure than the uploads from the actual users.

Fortunately the uploads were from a set of a few dozen static files, and de-duplicating the data via fdupes was able to drop disk usage by a factor of 20-50x.

I did something similar to this a while back, called qdupe[0], written in Python. It doesn't do the deleting for you, but is very fast at identifying duplicates if you have a lot to compare. Based on the fastdup algorithm.

[0] https://github.com/cwilper/qdupe

Is this multiplatform? I think it's interesting how many projects forget to mention what operating system they target.

Yeah, I wrote something similar a long time ago in Python: https://bitbucket.org/panzi/finddup/src

It's not exactly clear, but I'm assuming this is some kind of automated hard-linking utility? Or does it use its own special magic? (filesystem type restrictions?)

not nearly as fancy, but it gets the job done for me: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3555/find-duplica...

a similar tool is https://code.google.com/p/hardlinkpy/