Many of us end up, inevitably, with so many files and folders that it is impossible to keep them under control without some specialized help. Luckily, as I’ll show you in a moment, under Linux there are several, very efficient solutions to this problem.
Multiple copies of many files, scattered all over the computer, waste space, create confusion, and slow down desktop indexers like DocFetcher. I have already explained how to find and remove the unwanted extra copies here.
When it comes time to clean up your folders and files, a common problem crops up: how can I find where duplicate files and folders exist between multiple directories? The problem is both more complex and much more common than it may appear at first sight. A directory may contain many, many levels of sub-directories, each with thousands of files of all sorts. Trying to figure out manually the differences between two directory trees like those could take days.