Gemini Review – Find and Delete Duplicate Files

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I’ve had my iMac for a year now.  There’s nothing like a fresh hard drive when you get a new computer.  If you’re like me though, you tend to save everything.  I’m kind of a file packrat.  I have folder upon folder on my hard drive with pictures and files that I’ve saved in numerous places on my Mac.  While I have plenty of room on my 1 TB drive, it’s somewhat silly to have two or three copies of the SAME file on the SAME drive.  Especially since I use Time Machine to back up hourly changes to a separate hard drive. 

Whether I need the space or not, I want to clean it out.  Call it a disk spring cleaning if you will.  Gemini is a download from the Mac App Store ($9.99) that will help you find and delete duplicate files on your Mac. 

Gemini is really easy to use.  Once you’ve installed it from the App Store, you simply double click on the icon from your Launchpad.  Just drag and drop the folders you want to scan for duplicates on the interface. 

Click on scan and sit back to let Gemini do its work.  When it’s done, it will tell you the size of the duplicate files it found and then you can review them by clicking on show results.

So these were the duplicate files Gemini found in my selected folders.  Apparently my biggest problem is I save the same document files in duplicate places.

Clicking on an individual file will bring up the various file paths. Then you will go through the process of deciding which ones you want to keep and which ones you want to delete.  There are a few ways you can go about doing this; by allowing Gemini to choose (auto), choosing the newest, oldest or any file.  I choose to just manually click the box  to the side of the file for removal because I want the file that is to stay on my drive to be in the most obvious folder to me. When you’re done choosing all the files you want to delete, you click the ‘Remove Selected’ task and your files will be be placed in your Trash can (so in reality if you find that you want that file back and you haven’t emptied your Trash folder…you can still find it on your computer).

When you’re done removing your chosen files, Gemini will let you know how much space you freed up.

Where I feel this software really shines is the fact that it will find duplicate files even if they have different names.  Which is often the case for how I save things in my folder.  I’ll download a needed document or picture for a blog post and it will have a generic image001.jpg file name, but so I’ll be able to find it easier I’ll rename it specificmoviepostername.jpg while keeping the original copy.  Now I have two.  One in my download folder and one in my blog pictures folder.  Yet Gemini will still find both even though they have two different file names.  I’d likely never have the patience on my own to go through all my folders to weed duplicates like that out.

All in all I think Gemini is a pretty good utility app to have on your Mac.  It ran through its paces quickly while scanning and it’s simple to use with clear instructions on how to get started.  At $9.99 it’s not overly expensive if you prefer to have software to find your duplicate files to free up disk space.  Granted it’s something you could do on your own, but in this case I’d defer to the ‘time is money’ cliché and say it’s worth its cost for that reason alone.

Do you do “spring cleaning” on your computer hard drive?

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