I’m in the process of starting a proper backup solution however over the years I’ve had a few copy-paste home directory from different systems as a quick and dirty solution. Now I have to pay my technical debt and remove the duplicates. I’m looking for a duplication removal tool.
- accept a destination directory
- source locations should be deleted after the operation
- if files content is the same then delete the redundant copy
- if files content is different, move and change the name to avoid name collision I tried doing it in nautilus but it does not look at the files content, only the file name. Eg if two photos have the same content but different name then it will also create a redundant copy.
Use Borg Backup. It has built-in deduplication — it works with chunks not files and will recognize identical chunks and avoid storing them multiple times. It will deduplicate your files and will find duplicated chunks even in files you didn’t know had duplicates. You can continue to keep your files duplicated or clean them out, it doesn’t matter, the borg backups will be optimized either way.
Here are the stats from a backup of 1 server with approx 600gig
This archive: 592.44 GB 553.58 GB 13.79 MB All archives: 14.81 TB 13.94 TB 599.58 GB
Chunk index: 2760965 19590945
13meg… nice