Soldato
- Joined
- 27 Dec 2009
- Posts
- 2,727
- Location
- Gillingham, Kent
Just found another reason to love Windows 10. Boss brought his laptop in as his folders "were doing strange things". He'd managed to duplicate a few of his folders containing his Word docs - so now he had "Documents\Lodge Documents" and "Documents\Lodge Documents\Lodge Documents" and others. He had no idea how this happened, or when as he's only just noticed it. The files in the folders looked duplicated, but there weren't as many in the sub-folder as the main one, and yes - he's been updating some files but didn't know in which folder the newer ones.
You know, the standard thing that someone brings you that makes you want to hit their head repeatedly on the desk.
First thing, let's see how many of the files are duplicates, so told Win10 to move all the files from the subfolder into the main folder. A few copies, and asked what to do with the 315 same-named files. I selected to let me choose for each file with a view to see which folder contained the larger/smaller/newer version of each file. Win10 then showed me a column of the file in each folder, together with the filesize and date modified - which made things easier. Then I noticed a tickbox at the bottom that said to "Skip files of the same size and date". Ticked it and immediately it only showed the three files he'd amended, one was newer in the sub-folder and two in the main. Sorted these three out and could then happily delete the sub-folder knowing all the rest were duplicates.
The whole process would've taken a couple of hours manually with the folders he'd duplicated, or required a lower time after installing comparison software, in older versions of Windows, but only took a couple of minutes in Win10. Never tried this in Win 8/8.1 so don't know if this functionality was in there too, but whoever at Microsoft thought to add this tickbox - thank you!
You know, the standard thing that someone brings you that makes you want to hit their head repeatedly on the desk.
First thing, let's see how many of the files are duplicates, so told Win10 to move all the files from the subfolder into the main folder. A few copies, and asked what to do with the 315 same-named files. I selected to let me choose for each file with a view to see which folder contained the larger/smaller/newer version of each file. Win10 then showed me a column of the file in each folder, together with the filesize and date modified - which made things easier. Then I noticed a tickbox at the bottom that said to "Skip files of the same size and date". Ticked it and immediately it only showed the three files he'd amended, one was newer in the sub-folder and two in the main. Sorted these three out and could then happily delete the sub-folder knowing all the rest were duplicates.
The whole process would've taken a couple of hours manually with the folders he'd duplicated, or required a lower time after installing comparison software, in older versions of Windows, but only took a couple of minutes in Win10. Never tried this in Win 8/8.1 so don't know if this functionality was in there too, but whoever at Microsoft thought to add this tickbox - thank you!
hence why I like to leave major updates to my own timetable and HATE any degree of forced update. (That was pretty much my experience on half of my devices when I updated to 1511).
