Hello. I know that Apple contacts has a find and merge duplicates. Does this feature do a good job? Any other method or app?
I used the find/merge duplicates in Contacts years ago. It did ok, wasn’t perfect at identifying dups, but cleaned up over 75% of the mess I had with lots of duplicates that I believe were created when doing some MS Outlook testing.
Ignore everything I wrote below, answered mostly off title and missed the word contacts in there.
Deleting dubs on Mac
After too many years of switching computers and keeping a disk image backup of the previous, I found myself unsure if I had always moved everything to the newer computers. So I had like 5-6 computer’s worth of images to merge.
The finder has a feature when copying files into a folder now, but don’t think it has any way to trigger a GUI overview or configure options.
I tried Araxis Merge, Gemini, and possibly something else, but I wasn’t that happy with any of them. I ended up using Compare Folders, which is open source.
That being said, my situation was unique, and I didn’t want to trust a program to automatically do everything, so I wanted to be more hands on. I didn’t always go down to the deepest level folders to compare, but the ability to pick any two folders, even if their parent/grandparent hierarchy wasn’t the same, and make sure I had the newest and at least one copy of everything was what I needed to trust what was happening since I had let it accumulate for so long.
Note: IIRC I made a small modification to the code specific to what I wanted to do (can’t remember what now, but can look it up if someone really wants to know), but even without that it proved to be the most helpful for me.
Other options are command line tools like rsync and diff. I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t built a GUI around rsync, it’s very popular and has a lot of options. Also, compare and merge is a common programming task, so there are quite a few programs that can do it both on a line by line file level and directory structure level, which work just as well for non-programming files.
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