Dropbox is one of the most popular cloud storage platforms. Dropbox allows you to move off files from PC to cloud so your documents are available anytime and anywhere, irrespective of geographical boundaries. This is why a lot of people prefer to store their documents on Dropbox instead of carrying the burden of External Hard Disks or USB flash drives.

With Dropbox, you can work from your office, home or even a local cafe. Your data is accessible from almost everywhere as long as you have a stable Internet connection and a supporting device such as a laptop or smartphone.

Apart from mobility, Dropbox also lets you work offline as it is not uncommon for DSL or cable Internet users to experience disconnection due to bad weather. Dropbox has its own sync client that does the synchronization part and keeps your data up-to-date. It lets you work even in the absence of an active internet connection. You can read your data, modify your files or delete them if they’re not needed.

Dropbox will synchronize your changes to the server once your Internet connection is back. The modifications that you have made to your files will be updated on the server end within no time.

Another crucial benefit is that of security. When you upload files to Dropbox, it encrypts them with the AES-256 encryption standard. Encryption protects your data from unauthorized people such as cyber criminals. This is an important security feature that converts your data into random character sets. Therefore, even if a hacker happens to intercept your Internet traffic and sees data transmitting from your computer to server, it would still remain private and anonymous. As the data is encoded into random character sets instead of plain text, the hacker wouldn’t be able to read it.

Find Duplicate Excel Spreadsheets in Dropbox

Each Dropbox plan offers a limited amount of storage quota. As you use the service, you may run into the problem of duplication. Even if these files look smaller in size, they may occupy a significantly large storage space altogether. You’d be surprised to find a large number of identical copies of the same Excel spreadsheets. Not only spreadsheets, you could find other file types as well, such as documents, pictures, videos, music, compressed files etc.

Duplicates can not only waste a significant portion of your cloud space but also affect your productivity.

Following are some of the ways through which your productivity can be affected:

It becomes difficult to locate the right file when you urgently need it. The search results may display too many Excel spreadsheets with the same name.
You may waste a significant time updating the same worksheet again and again.
As your collection gets cluttered with too many duplicates, it may take several hours to download the data from your Drive. Not only that, it can take up a significant bandwidth. This matters especially if you’re using cellular data.

Multiple Patterns Of Duplication

Duplicate Excel files are found in Dropbox in different patterns. You may notice a prefix at the beginning or postfix at the end of a filename indicating that the file is a duplicate. For example: It is not uncommon to find file name patterns like these: balance_sheet.xlsx, balance_sheet(2).xlsx, balance_sheet(3).xlsx.

Another duplicate pattern is when two or more files share the same content but different filenames. It becomes difficult to track such duplicates manually. You may want to open up each file and compare the content with the rest but it is not an easy task to identify and fix duplicates by yourself. You surely need an algorithm-based solution that reviews the contents of each file and derives results accordingly.

Deleting Excel Duplicates In Dropbox

An algorithm-based solution can help you efficiently clean out duplicate junk and reclaim lost storage. Cloud Duplicate Finder offers this functionality.

CDF is a browser-based software that does not require any download or install. It supports scanning popular cloud platforms including Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Amazon S3 and Box.

One of the benefits of using CDF is flexibility. The program gives you the choice to scan all folders or you can also specify custom folders of your choice. Besides that, CDF lets you decide which file types to scan for duplication. You may check individual options among documents, images, music, videos and archives.

For your privacy and protection, the CDF application itself will not ask for or store your password. In order to integrate your cloud account, CDF will redirect you to the relevant cloud provider where initially, you’ll be asked to log-in and approve permission. In other words, you provide your login credentials on the official cloud provider’s platform, not CDF. Remember, you can revoke these permissions at any time. This is the safest way to share file access privileges without compromising on your data and privacy.

In order to process your requests, CDF uses special APIs from the official cloud service vendors.

CDF also has a previewing functionality that lets you preview the contents of your images without having to download them to your PC. This speeds up and simplifies the reviewing task.

Sign-up on Cloud Duplicate Finder. You can connect using your social media accounts to avoid email verification.
Click on ‘Add New Drive’ under the Dropbox section. Follow the on-screen instructions to authorize your Cloud Account integration.
After successful integration, CDF will now load the list of your cloud folders on the left-hand side. Check individual folder items to specify which folders to scan for duplicates.
Set ‘All Files’ option to check every file type for duplicates or set ‘Custom’ option to select individual file types.
Start the scan now and wait for some time.
Once the scan is finished, you should now be able to see a list of all duplicate files. Your files are classified into different groups based on a similar hash. Hash is a randomly generated code that maps arbitrary data in a file. When multiple files share the same hash, it indicates duplication of the content.
Use the ‘Select Duplicates’ button on the bottom to choose a version of duplicate files in each group.
Use ‘Select Action’ to specify a universal action: Move any selected files to Trash or to a folder of your choice.

Note: Depending on your cloud platform, the contents in the Trash folder may be deleted automatically.

For instance: Microsoft OneDrive retains the contents of the Trash folder for a maximum of 30 days or 93 days for work or school accounts respectively. In Dropbox, there is no such retention limit, as of now.

M Saleh

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Saleh works as a Wordpress Publishing Manager and a Software Quality Assurance Tester at Sorcim Technologies (pvt) Ltd. The content written in this blog is owned by Sorcim Technologies. If you have any questions about the content, please contact us through the support channel.