Found duplicate files, now what?

Sean_34 · Feb 14, 2017

Alright, so every article or forum post about duplicate files in your storage always gives you recommended programs and never really much more than that? Easy enough, but now what?

I'm using cCleaner and have found a ton of duplicate and even... triplicate(?????) files. I'm doing this because before I really understood downloading drivers, I downloaded AMD Crimson drivers like 8 times. Also, my Steam and game files are spread over 2 drives and 4 or 5 folders. I am contemplating just backing everything up with Macrium and starting over so that I can get them all into 1 place because i'm trying to learn how mod Fallout 4 and the clutter is making it difficult.

So, i have all these duplicates

but which ones do I delete? Does it matter? Those articles only ever tell you how to find them, not how to go about deleting them.

Thanks for any help

Eximo · Feb 14, 2017

AMD driver files, one is likely the extracted files themselves, another in your temp directory, and the third where it actually installed the various applications. Not sure why E would be the destination for video drivers, so that might be another thing to look into.

Fallout 4 is interesting, might just need to uninstall that, delete everything but your user files and try again. Not sure why there would be two copies of the texture files.

Sean_34 · Feb 14, 2017

Eximo :

E:// is my main drive, I think that's just what I designated it when I set it up, while D:// is my system reserved partition. I know that people usually designate their main HDD as D://.

Should my video drivers be somewhere in particular? They're used by the GPU no matter where they are, right? I just like to put all my drivers on my HDD, in Program Files.

If it turns out that deleting all my games and jank is the right answer, then i'll probably just end up backing everything up and starting from scratch, like I said.

Eximo · Feb 14, 2017

Not quite sure I take your meaning when it comes to drive letters. Generally OS is on C, and your typical system reserved partition isn't seen in the OS at all.

If you are redirecting all bulk files to a hard drive, that is fine. Just a matter of telling the difference between your system's active files and places where files are just sitting. I would consider removing all but the program files directory for the AMD drivers. You can always download and re-install those again if something goes wrong.

Typical steam installation of a game should put some files in the steamapps folder and in the user directory, not really sure why there seems to be duplicates of primary game files though. Unless a repair install or something had been run, or you moved/changed where Steam is set to install before and after an install of Fallout 4.

Sean_34 · Feb 14, 2017

Eximo :

Yea, my C:// is my OS drive, I was just clarifying that my E:// is my main where I like to path everything to. I can see my system reserved, perhaps because at some point I remember changing something so that I could see all hidden folders; that's why they're all grayed out.

What do you mean by "active" vs "sitting" files? As for deleting all AMD files that aren't in program files, I've simply been highlighting and deleting any AMD files that are outside of program file because using the Uninstall utility wouldn't get rid of them, so I hope that's okay.

There may be duplicate steam files because I have indeed been moving steam files around trying to consolidate, but I have been trying to use "cut" so that it doesn't just copy stuff. I found two batches of the same Steam client files. Which do I delete or does it matter? Is there any way to tell which batch Steam is using?

Eximo · Feb 14, 2017

I don't recall suggesting uninstalling your graphics drivers to try and remove them. Just that if you did accidentally delete the wrong files you could easily re-install.

You would have to look at the installation path of the steam install.

Not sure how to be more clear. The system needs files in certain places to be able to perform the tasks you are asking of it. Files themselves can be anywhere, whether a particular program needs them for operation is another matter entirely. So if I have a non-system file sitting on the root of a drive, and I didn't intentionally put it there, then it is a plain file and is taking up space. (this is not advice to go around deleting things) As I said the excess files from AMD are very likely to be the extracted files and a copy in the temporary directory for re-installs. They should be quite easy to tell apart.

You can look at your installed programs and open their file locations to get a pretty clear picture where any particular application lives.

CCleaner should look at temporary files and folders, but if you have moved or manipulated them they may no longer show up where expected to its searches. Cutting and pasting files with anything other than simple stored files is going to end poorly on some things.

For instance with Fallout 4, Steam may have re-downloaded and installed the program back where it was copied from and that is how you ended up with two instances of it.

hang-the-9 · Feb 15, 2017

If it's in your Downloads folder, you can probably delete everything there you don't actually need, you would know what you need there more than anyone. Setup files for programs that are installed, OK to delete if you need the space. Anything that is a duplicate in the same directory, OK to delete.

philipgore · Jan 31, 2018

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