Messages

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for Software with this feature

« on: July 09, 2015, 04:09 PM »

IainB, thanks for your continued explanation of why size isn't a concern.   I believe you.   I saved copies of all the original files, so I will restart the organizing process at a later date.  The files don't take up much space anyway, so they can just stay as is for now.   Right now I'm very busy.  It's summer time and I have a huge problem on my sundeck and have to repair it and repaint it, which involves removing everything off the deck, taking to a rented storage unit because my rented apartment where I live is too cluttered and no room to stack everything in the living room.  It all has to be done before the usual rainy days begin in August.   However, I will continue to look at replies here when I can.   For me it wasn't a waste of time posting my question here because you and others did help me to change my view about the size.   Also, I am going to check out all the software that you and others have suggested.   Thank you all for you're time.

I will check out the software during the evening when it's too late to make noise on the deck.   One other things is that I suffer from severe depression, anxiety and insomnia which resulted after more than 10 years of continuous trauma inflicted on me by the Family Court Mafia.  So for a large portion of the day, I'm very tired, fatiqued and slow thinking.

I might have a future project where I program my arduino to play my guitar while I pretend to drink beer.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for Software with this feature

« on: July 09, 2015, 12:10 AM »

Well, if it were the guitar pro tabs that I created myself, I would never take such chances on them, just to let you know that I understand the risk of such software.

When I signed up for this forum a couple days ago, I didn’t realize that the members in the discussions are programmers.   I’m not a programmer.  I’ve only done some machine language programming for the Z80 when I was in college.

Because the issue has been brought up though, about the risk involved in such software, and I’ve had some time to think about it, I’m thinking now that maybe such a software wouldn’t be a good idea.  That leads me to a different requirement then, thanks to all the input.

I would require the software to:

1.   Have an automated Move function in which I can select options to make it compare the contents of the files to be moved with the contents of all the files in the target folder.  Then all files with unique contents would be saved, and if more than one file has the same content, then only one would be saved.  Renaming would be done in any event where two or more files to be saved have the same name.
2.   The software would also have a Remove Duplicates function where it can scan any selection of files and folders for files with the same contents, renaming files when necessary and removing duplicates.

 I don’t see this software coming into existence in the near future, so in the meantime, I’m going to just use the Windows 7 function of automatically keeping all of the files, regardless of size, and renaming all of the same name duplicates.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for Software with this feature

« on: July 08, 2015, 02:13 PM »

IainB, you aren't the first one on this thread to not understand why file size is an issue for me.   I will explain my reason.  I have several thousands of guitar pro tab files that I've downloaded and some I've created myself.  They are tiny files less than 100kb each.   The total size of all the files is something like about 5 or 6 gb Many of them are duplicated in different folders.  I've already spent a few weeks and many, many hours on organizing them and trying different programs.   The reason why I move and replace if the file is same size is that in my opinion it highly unlikely that two files with same name and size have different content, although it's possible.  I want to organize them accurately, but I don't have the time, so I'm willing to take chances on losing some of them in the events that two or more files of the same size and name have different content.   If I created an ordinary text file at one point and gave the file a name, then a few years later created a text file and just happend to give it the exact same name, creating a duplicate but in a different folder.   The two files would most likely have different sizes but not necessarily, but their content is obviously very different.  In this case, I wouldn't want to just overwrite one of the files with the other because the odds of the two having different content is too high for my liking.  With the guitar pro files, a file name includes the name of the band and the name of the song.  In my opinion, with two guitar pro tab files with same size and same name will have the same content.   It's possible that someone might have edited the file slightly so that it still has the same size.   There might be an important difference in the content, but I'm willing to take the chance because of time.   If I were to remove all of the duplicates, the total size of all the files might be reduced to about 1gb.  One option I have with windows is I could just move all of the files and keep all files with same name by automatically renaming them.  This might not be so bad an idea.  The total size wouldn't get reduced to about 1gb and would remain the same size (5 or 6gb) and nothing would be lost.   But still, it would be nice to have a program that would give some options that I want and the ability to automate it for a hands free operation.  For me, if it took a week to do the operation automatically without me even being there, that's not a problem because finally I'd be free to work on some of the many other things I have to work on.  I hope you'll be able to understand my need for comparing file size now.  If not, then maybe it's me who's missing something?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for Software with this feature

« on: July 08, 2015, 05:02 AM »

I found this software called NiceCopier today.   It's the closest so far to what I'm looking for, but still doesn't have enough automation.   Plus, it doesn't compare the contents of the files.  It's the only one so far that compares the size.
https://sourceforge....projects/nicecopier/

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for Software with this feature

« on: July 06, 2015, 03:37 PM »

""Size" could be a potentially unreliable comparison, so I would recommend using "Content" instead."

Yes I was aware of this and was wondering if anyone would notice it and mention it.  

It would be better to check the content and there are duplicate removal programs that do compare the content with checksums.   I only mentioned size because that would atleast be better than my manually moving the files.   After posting the question, I was thinking I should have included the content.  When I'm moving files, most of them are of same size and I overwrite the files, but I often am moving too fast and when it gets to two files of different size, I overshoot and overwrite (so I lose one).   Also, sometimes I've manually compared the content in two files of equal size and found sometimes that one file is corrupted and won't open, even though it has the same size.   So for sure, it would be better to compare the content.   In fact, as far as I'm concerned, this would make the program valuable.  In the programs for duplicates removal, the programs do a scan and once done it lists all the duplicates.  Then to remove them you have to manually select which ones to remove (or you can allow the program to select, but I haven't found one yet that can be trusted for this function.   If there aren't many duplicates in the hard drive, then manually selecting the ones to remove isn't a big deal.   But when having to remove hundreds or even thousands of duplicates, this can take many hours of work.   An example of having such large numbers of duplicates is when people use hard drive backup programs and the programs keeps copying the same files over and over into different folders and mixing them up until the hard drive is full and the user doesn't know what to do.   I don't use backup software, but I know of people that do and I've been asked to sort it out.   I've done this in my brother's computer and it took me many hours.

I would modifiy the filters as follows:
Filter #1:  If the file being moved has the same name, extension, size and content as a file already existing in the target folder, then overwrite the existing file.

Filter #2:  If the file being moved has the same name and extension as a file already existing in the target folder, but the two files are different in size or have different content or both, then move the file, but keep both files.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for Software with this feature

« on: July 01, 2015, 05:52 PM »

Here is an example of moving a file of same name into a folder that already has a file with the same name, but the two files have a different size.  Windows 7 already determined that they have different sizes.  This is the reason why I believe it should be possible for a programmer to create a program with such a filter.

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General Software Discussion / Looking for Software with this feature

« on: June 29, 2015, 11:22 PM »

I'm looking for software that will allow me to move files from one folder to another, in Windows 7, but with the ability to create filters such as the following:

Filter #1:  If the file being moved has the same name, extension and size as a file already existing in the target folder, then overwrite the existing file.

Filter #2:  If the file being moved has the same name and extension as a file already existing in the target folder, but the two files are different in size, then move the file, but keep both files.

I've spent hours checking software, including software for finding and removing duplicate files, and haven't yet found anything with this feature.