I just ran CCleaner again and it did not find any duplicates at all.
I think the file extensions of those who seemed to return after deletion included .jpg, .pdf, .odt. I don’t recall any email files but there may have been a few.
All files are on my external hard drive I use for these backups so there’s no connection to OneDrive, which I use to save files for the last two years. I transfer them a year at a time to the hard drive at the end of each year.
I like the soon-to-arrive addiions to CCleaner you listed. The deletion process now is definitely helpful but this sounds even faster.
So I think everything is coming into focus. I wanted to ask about incremental backups. I donwloaded a backup app (don’t recall the name and I uninstalled it) that popped up a message about not being able to use my hard drive because it already had files on it, basically. Is that something common to incremental backups? I also wonder if there is a backup program that accepts by hard drive, is there a risk of losing some or all of my files already saved on the drive?
No that isn’t common to backup software, but of course that depends on the software and how you set it up - there are many different ways of doing backing up.
if you are going to use an ‘always connected’ drive for backing up to then I can see hw the software may then want to keep that drive for backups only.
Personally I don’t do incremantal backups, and I tend to do mine manually.
Each week (at least) I’ll copy my Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders to a network connected drive over wifi;
Then I’ll commect my backup drive to a USB posr and use Macrium Reflect to do a full disc image of my OS drive (C:) to the backup drive, and then unplug the drive when it’s finished and put it in a safe place.
I have Reflect set to keep the last 12 backups and delete the oldest when it makes a new one; that way the backup drive doesn’t get full.
PS. Reflect doesn’t care if there are already files on the drive, as long as there is room for the backup image(s) that it creates that is all it needs.
This is my current backup drive, as you can see it currently contains image backups from 3 different laptops, as well as a folder of files that I recovered from a friends crashed drive a couple of years ago, and some downloaded Film and TV. It’s currently about 3/4 full
I recently upgraded to CCleaner 7 and I don’t think it’s going to work for me. Moving duplicate finder to disk analyzer seems to have made the scan last WAY TOO LONG!!! I’m talking hours to scan the same external backup drive I had when this project of mine started. And the results found A TON of duplicate files, which may been put there by a backup app I tried out. Those results also did not include file paths for each of the duplicate files, which I found very helpful in version 6.
All in all, I’m leaning toward replacing CCleaner entirely. I hope you can convince me otherwise and help get things working faster and better.
I tried these instructions, installed V 6.39 and did a couple of duplicate file searches. I took screenshots of the search fields and search results, then searched on Windows Explorer using a common word, “logos”. As you can see, CCleaner said there were no duplicate files but Explorer found the duplicates in the screen shot. And that was just a partial list.
I don’t see any reason CCleaner shouldn’t find at least some duplicates, especially since it did a great job in the previous serveral months. I’ve been looking at alternatives to CCleaner but if you have any other suggestions, send them along.
You are searching for different things in each case, and so of course you got different results.
FE was only searching for filenames that contain the word “logos” and so it found it many.
By contrast you have CCleaner set to search for three things, where all three constarints have to be matched if the files are to be marked as being duplicates.
You have told it to search for filenames that are the same, that also had the same size, and also had the same modified date.
You had given CCleaner more search rules and the files on F: drive didn’t match those extra rules.
It will have found those files with the same names, but the files size was different, or the file modified date was different.
