I’m not the tidiest person on the planet, but I’m far from a slob. When it comes to my Mac I try to keep things as simple and straightforward as I can, but sometimes duplicates find themselves piling up in locations I never would have thought possible.
One slip of a key stroke, or a double click of a file in Cyberduck, and the next thing you know you’re piling up random files and duplicates everywhere. It’s not fun, and it drives me absolutely crazy. I’ve mentioned the preference-pane hazel before, and it works wonders at automating stuff, but sometimes you miss things. You can’t set up rules to clean stuff up, if you don’t know there’s files that need to be cleaned up.
This is where TidyUp! comes in super handy. It’s far from perfect, but it gets your duplicates for you, and is even smart enough to make comparisons of files that seem unrelated, but are exactly the same. It lets you narrow down your criteria so you can focus on removing stuff that you’re looking for instead of scanning your entire hard drive and being completely overwhelmed by the amount of duplicates you have kicking around. It’s super user friendly, and helps you with slimming down your hard drive.
Word to the wise: sometimes you have duplicates for a reason, so you need to be diligent in making sure the duplicates you’re removing aren’t backups of something important.
