Pegasus said:
Experience says that such an exercise will not achieve much,
for these reasons:
- People often select the same file name when storing different
data, e.g. they have "Expenses.xls" in different folders.
- When they save the file twice, they frequently neglect one
copy later on. You would then see two files with the same
name but with of different sizes and file dates. Which one
can you delete?
This translates into an extremely time-consuming task. It
would be far more cost-effective to increase your storage
space. If your growth figure is excessive then you should
charge storage costs back to the user departments. Quotas
might help too.
Products to do the job are already be out there at places like
Tucows and Download - and sure enough, a search for
"duplicate" in "Windows" produces lots of hits at Tucows.
Those products search for duplicate files, not merely duplicate
file names.
Detecting duplicates is the easy part: its what to do with
them when you find them that is the tricky part. The technical
part is very easy - select files and either simply delete them
or replace them with shortcuts to a "master copy".
What makes things difficult is making sure that you don't step on
any toes when you find duplicate files and eliminate some
or all of the extraneous copies. Example: in order to know
that it is safe for you to delete all duplicates of a particular
file you usually have to know what is in the file - and sometimes
(often !) you will have absolutely no business viewing that file.
When hard drives were expensive, I had to deal with this issue
all the time. Example, HQ would send out a memo and every idiot
would save his own copy of the memo - so I would search for
duplicates of the memos I got (and hence that I had security
clearance to read) and I would replaces users' copies with
shortcuts to the master copy.
However, now that hard drives cost about as much per GB than
they did per MB back in those days, I wouldn't touch this issue
with a ten foot pole. It costs far more to deal with the
duplicates in a manner that respects security issues than it does
to simply buy more hard drives.
