Surely you have noticed that it costs very little to fill computer or laptop hard drive with duplicate documents and files. This can have a negative impact on free storage space and long term performance.
Finding and manually deleting all those junk files can become an endless task. Fortunately, there are several ways to get rid of all those duplicate documents quickly, easily, and efficiently. We explain how.
Why do duplicate files accumulate on Mac?
In most cases, the reason we have duplicate files is because we have uploaded the same document more than once. You may have accidentally clicked a download link twice.
Other reasons could be songs you added in iTunes without removing originals, attachments from your mail, among others. Escaping file duplication on Mac and Windows seems inevitable.
How to Manually Remove Duplicate Files on Mac from Finder
If you don’t trust external apps, you can trust Finder to find the same files you saved multiple times and permanently delete them from there. For that, you need to use macOS smart folders.
So click on the ‘Archive‘in the menu bar, followed by’New smart folder“. Inside you have to click on the icon ‘+‘in the upper right corner and you can now search for documents, photos, music or other file types.
The key is how you organize the results. We recommend that you sort them by name, as this should help you find duplicate files at a glance. Then all you have to do is delete the ones you no longer need.
You will see that it is a simple process, but the truth is, it is not at all practical. It will take a long time for you to go through all your documents and clear out duplicates, so we recommend that you bet on a program that does the job for you.
How to Remove Duplicate Files on Mac Using Third-Party Applications
There are many duplicate file locators on the Mac App Store that will scan your system and find duplicate documents that you need to delete from your Mac or MacBook to free up space and improve performance.
Many of them are also free, as is the case with Duplicate File Finder Remover The Duplicate Cleaner. You can also take advantage of Toolbox trial version and use the “Find duplicates” function.
Most of them offer similar functionality: the application scans your Mac’s hard drive and returns a list of duplicate files with the original file so that you don’t make a mistake and know which one to save .
Normally you will have to pay for the advanced version in which you will have functions premium like removing duplicate folders, hidden files and similar functions. The price of the paid versions will depend on each one Software.
One of our favorite apps is Gemini 2: The Duplicate Finder. You can download it for free but you will have to pay to use its smart cleanup feature, which is able to find duplicate files both on your Mac and on hard drives and cloud services.
If you’re doing a cleanup on your Mac or MacBook, you’ll also be interested in visiting these tutorials:
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