Tame your digital pack rat

Now that we’re measuring storage in terabytes, it’s all too easy to just save everything, including your awful undergrad papers on Kurt Vonnegut and those photos of every second of your kid’s first year -- with the inevitable duplicates, of course. Despite our best intentions, it seems like every time we upgrade our Macs, the files multiply. Minimalistic Development’s solution is Singlemizer, a tool for finding and eliminating duplicate files. Singlemizer is powerful stuff, and it can make quick work of years’ worth of shoddy file management.

Color-coded dupes make housecleaning easy.

After dragging files or entire folders into Singlemizer’s window, you specify inclusion and exclusion rules to define your search. You can compare files by their Uniform Type Identifiers (UTIs), filename, directory name, and you can even determine a file-size range to help narrow the field. Seven default rules are included, but you can add or remove as many as you need to find the files you’re looking for.

Singlemizer’s searches are powerful, but the application can be somewhat archaic. It requires you to have a pretty specific idea of what sort of file duplicates you’re looking for before you actually get started, and, more importantly, you have to be able to tell Singlemizer how to look for those files using its rule system.

Singlemizer’s powerful rules system enables you to tell it precisely what to check (and avoid) when looking for duplicate files.

Once you’ve set the where and what of your scan, Singlemizer combs through your files, returning results in real time so you can assess whether you’re finding the right files. Singlemizer flags duplicate files by color and groups them together. It also identifies one copy of the file as the “master,” so you won’t delete all instances of your files. (You can unflag the master if you really want to delete it, too.)

Singlemizer doesn’t compare files bit by bit; instead, it uses sophisticated hashing algorithms that work much faster. As a result, it’s possible that the app will identify false-positive matches, but the more specific your search criteria, the better job Singlemizer does at detecting dupes. Once you’re happy with the results, a Trash Checked button will send those files to your system Trash for later disposal.

The bottom line. Singlemizer helps you keep your hard disk free of messy duplicate files. Just plan on spending some time mastering its complex interface.