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Delete Crawler

Started by dedndave, August 03, 2014, 12:04:13 AM

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dedndave

for a long time, i have wanted a little tool for this
it probably exists out there as an app, someplace   :P

sometimes, i want to move to a clean drive....
i have backup images of the OS/installed programs, etc
but, several times, i have wanted to delete files from one drive, if they exist on another

this is a bare-bones program to do that
it recursively steps through all the folders and files of a "destination" drive
if that same file exists on the second "source" drive, it is deleted from the destination

this one has no command-line parser or status display - you can add that stuff, as desired
it does, however, have a Sleep manager - so it does not hog the CPU or thrash the drives
you can add whatever features you like - or put it in a GUI app

i used it yesterday - it deleted about 50 Gb, leaving the desired 5 Gb to go through, manually

dedndave

i can see that i need to add a "delete empty folders" feature next time i run it - lol

jj2007

Nice idea :t

Good if you have a backup e.g. of fotos, and want to cleanup the original drive.

dedndave

it needs some work - but got the job at hand done

i want to re-write it so it will handle seperate paths
i.e. start at non-root paths, and work with different base paths for dest and source

Gunther

Dave,

good job. Thank you for providing it.

Gunther
You have to know the facts before you can distort them.

dedndave

thanks, Gunther

plenty of room for improvement
but, i thought it might save someone a little coding time if they wanted such a function

KeepingRealBusy

Dave,

How do you determine that the file is the same as another file? Can the name change? Can the path change? Can the drive change? Can the date/time change? Obviously, the size cannot change. Do you check or calculate the two CRCs to see if they match?

I ask because my better half has a habit of changing filenames (without a content change), moving directories around to different parent directories, etc. Her backup method is to drag and drop the entire data drive root (E drive) to a backup drive, and create a total new save directory with massive file duplication. This is not necessarily bad because she has a duplicate (or many duplicate) of any file she may loose on her main data drive.

However, she has completely filled a pair of 1 TB drives, I need to get her a pair of 4 TB drives. This is not necessarily a good thing either, as I found out. My new 4 TB drives had some bad space, unbeknown to me, and I discovered that fact when I tried to copy one backup directory to the other drive of the pair. Trying to do a complete surface scan on 4 TB drives is a bitch.

Dave.

dedndave

this version only deletes files if they have the same path (except drive letter) and name
it suits my needs when i create an image of a drive, then restore it and wish to remove some duplicates

here is a  scenerio where it makes sense...

a) i create 2 partitions from the same image - they are now identical except drive letter
b) i delete all the "data" files from one of the 2 partitions:
pictures, e-mails, browser bookmarks, asm source files, PDF's and other documents, etc
c) now, i can use the crawler to delete everything but the data files from the other partition
after some clean-up, i have the data files on one partition and the system/program files on the other

in the case of finding match files with different names and locations, that's a whole different app
this one compares the 2 files for exact match, once a location/name/size match has been found
look at the "DoCompare" PROC to see how it's done

dedndave

this particular case was a little different than mentioned above

some time ago, i had created a backup of my then current boot drive
so - that partition and the one i was using differed by files added or updated since that time
the one i was using as a boot partition got messed up
so - i switched to the other one, but now i wanted just the files that were added or had been changed   :biggrin:

the messed up partition had something like 55-60 Gb on it
after i ran the crawler - and did some clean-up - i got it down to less than 1 Gb of files  :t
all the stuff that was messed up is now gone
i moved that 1 Gb to another partition - and rebuilt that one as another boot partition