Hard drive space

[James41]

I have a shortage of space on my c drive and moved as much as possible to other drives. There appear to be lots of duplicates which a special program has found. Some of these are tiny but there are hundreds of them. The program claims to have found 141Mb of duplicates with the same name and 41Mb of "identical" dulpicates. I'm not sure if that means the name and the size are the same but the content might not be.
I need to get rid of a lot of these but don't want to "mess up" the system by so doing. Any advice about the best way of doing this? A lot of the duplicates were written by Scandisk!

James

[Alfons]

Hi James41, have you cleaned out your Temporary, History, and Cookies Folders? Also Recycle Bin? All your Email Files?

Clearing out the TEMP folder should get rid of a whole bunch of Scandisk's handywork.

[James41]

Hi Alfons,
I have cleared out some of these. The rest don't hold more than about 10Mb but I lost 100Mb through Scandisk when it made copies of some files. The duplicate search found a lot but I don't know which ones were made by Scandisk

[Alfons]

A quick way to see what's really dumpable is to start another computer with 95 and compare the directories to see where you really need to have each file (I assume that the duplicates are in different directories (folders)). Another way would be to perform a name change on all except one to see where you need that file - if you didn't get the right place then you know that the one you left alone, you can now get rid of (or at least change it's name). If you try this, you'll need to keep a list of what works & what doesn't, otherwise you'll get lost and potentially make things worse.

[James41]

Thanks for the idea Alfons. At the moment I'm trying the option on the duplicate searching program which allows me to save a text (.txt) file recording where the duplicates are. The problem is that there are 41 Mb of them, some as small as a few bytes. So far I have recorded 200 files on a floppy which contain the references to about half of the small files. This has been five hours work so far! There are 400 groups of such files.
It only gives me the name, size,path etc of each group having the same name amd content. I'll have to decide to move some of the offending files to another drive before deleting any of them from my C drive. It's a slow process but I can't think of a quicker way.
Any slick and safe ideas welcome. What you have said is similar and I can't see a quicker way.

James

[Alfons]

That sounds like a lot of work James, is there any reason why you don't save whatever data that you need and reinstall Windows?

[James41]

It's not the machine I'm on now as I've just bought a new one but it's an old 486 which will not run anything later than win95. I've got some older programs I like on win3.1 so somebody helped me install an upgrade to windows 95 by having the two systems side by side, sharing some elements I think. I'm not totally clear how it was done and I don't want to just re-install win95 in case it upsets the system as a whole.
I have two hard drives - 1.2Gb C drive and a 6 Gb partitioned into drives D,E and F. I've got a reasonable amount of room on D,E and F but C went down to 90Mb free when Scandisk duplicated some files last June. It gave the message that some applications were sharing files and it would make duplicates - one for each application. I did not realise that it was going to use 80mb of my free space at that time.
Obviously I shall work mostly on my new machine but would like to recover some space on the old C drive to make it more efficient so that my wife can use it when I'm on the new one!

[James41]

.. to follow on Alfons....

I have gained 125Mb by moving the Windows folder(3.1) to the D drive. the other duplicates seem to be between win95 folders - system and sybckup... dos and win95...win95\inf and win95\system... win95\plugins and win\system... win95\system and win95\system\dxbackup..disks95 and win95.
What I can't understand is that none of these combinations show the date when the Scandisk operation took place?

Any ideas on that aspect?

James