Suggestions for eliminating duplicate files

[Borgholio]

I'm out of hard drive space. It's due to the fact I have as many as 7 or 8 copies of a lot of my files...pictures, videos, documents, etc... This is typically because when I was going through old hard drives in the garage, I copied the contents to my current drive to sort through later in case there was something I wanted to keep. But now I'm out of room. Currently I'm using the duplicate file finder contained within the PerfectDisk program and it works...ok. But it's slow and kinda tedious to use. Does anybody have any suggestions on the best way to search for and eliminate duplicate files? Any recommended programs or tricks I can use? Thanks!

[Zixinus]

CCleaner has such a functionality and there is also this one I use that's also free.

[Elheru Aran]

And once you're done with cleaning up your dupes, find a external hard drive that's pretty durable and transfer everything to it, then use that as a long-term storage resource once you're done. I'm assuming the kind of thing you're trying to save are personal pictures, documents, work stuff, other records and what not. You don't need to keep duplicating that stuff.

[Borgholio]

Yeah I already use Crashplan to backup to an external drive on another computer as well as offsite cloud backup, so I have enough duplication as it is. Trouble is all the crap I found on my older hard drives.

[Sea Skimmer]

If you know you have lots of duplicate videos just start searching by the file extensions and sort that by name and size. That will clear up space quicker then anything else.

[The Infidel]

And once you're done with cleaning up your dupes, find a external hard drive that's pretty durable and transfer everything to it, then use that as a long-term storage resource once you're done. I'm assuming the kind of thing you're trying to save are personal pictures, documents, work stuff, other records and what not. You don't need to keep duplicating that stuff.

This! You want a backup!
Sometimes a disk crashes, sometimes you delete by mistake, sometimes it's ransomware. I've had a disk crash. Probably the controller. It went dead in less than one second and nothing could be done on the low side of a few thousand dollars. Ransomware is an expanding "industry", and we will see more of this in 2017.

[Zixinus]

I second Infidel's: hard disk have a tendency to cough up and die. External hard drives too.

Use something like CrystalDiskInfo to check this. You might get a warning.

It is also recommended that you do defragmentation or a hard disk check with sector checking on them (even on flash drives from time to time).

[Ace Pace]

It is also recommended that you do defragmentation or a hard disk check with sector checking on them (even on flash drives from time to time).

no no no no no no
Just no. What the fuck is this 90s advice.

You should not defragment a flash drive. Ever.
You should not need to defragment a drive that is formatted with a modern file system (NTFS, ext3/4) and a modern OS (Win7 and up). In rare cases will it improve things.

[Zixinus]

The point isn't defragmentation but sector check. Which I should have said.