Dropbox is a cloud storage platform that has spelt enormous benefits for its consumers. Users can easily save data for free (upto a certain limit), and add up further storage by subscribing to a paid plan. This relieves them of the trouble they might have faced had their laptop’s hard disk suddenly went quiet. This is a huge benefit in itself and cannot be emphasized enough!
Cloud storage platforms, like Dropbox, also provide an easy access to users from across the globe at the entering of their account’s password. This enables them to, for instance, continue to perform urgent professional tasks, while they’re traveling abroad! Even better is the fact that they can choose to share different files with different users and all users can collaborate on any given file in real-time! Another big plus point that is.
Users can easily upload files of all kinds from their desktop/ laptop to Dropbox (back and forth) without any fuss. Sounds great, but this can also lead to the creation of duplicate files. What do you do in such an eventuality?
There are 2 main reasons why you have mistakenly accumulated duplicate files:
- If you store the same file with different names, they will be stored as different files.
- If you store the same file in different locations in your Dropbox folder, they will be stored as different files.
Find and delete Duplicate files
You can easily identify and delete duplicate files. But this method suffers from its own fair share of limitations. This is a very tedious task (if the number of files is huge in number), you have to rely on the filename only to determine if it’s a duplicate or not, which means you’re absolutely disregarding the actual content. Lastly, you simply cannot identify if a Zip file is a duplicate or not by just ‘examining it’. Don’t even think you can do this all by extracting the files from every single Zip file. Probably, the doomsday will arrive and you’d still be occupied with your job! 😛
Simply download and install Clone Files Checker. Install it, select the Cloud Scan tab and click on Dropbox. Click Load Drive and sign in by entering your login credentials. Wait for the data to be loaded and then launch the scan by selecting the target folder(s) and clicking Start Search. Once the scan is over, choosing between deleting the duplicate Zip files or moving them to a separate folder shan’t pose any difficulty.
Note: If you opt to delete the duplicates, they will be deleted and moved to the Deleted files section of Dropbox, from where you will have to delete them manually to purge them forever. Also, please note that the whole process of loading data in the Clone Files Checker interface, the subsequent scan as well as the final course-of-action all fall on the slower side, so you will need to be patient.
Raza Ali Kazmi works as an editor and technology content writer at Sorcim Technologies (Pvt) Ltd. He loves to pen down articles on a wide array of technology related topics and has also been diligently testing software solutions on Windows & Mac platforms. If you have any question about the content, you can message me or the company's support team.