AdamStout^.com

A couple of months ago I bought an Iomega ix2 Network Attached Storage device.  While Iomega's name isn't what it was back in the day of the zip drive, since they are now owned by EMC, I figured the quality must be ok.  Overall, I think I got what I paid for, but the drives are a little slow when serving pictures and music.  It works fine for my back ups, but I think I'll buy something a little faster next time to at as a home media server.

The major thing I wanted to accomplish with my new shared storage was to get all the pictures and MP3s that I had on my laptop, desktop, a my wife's desktop into a central location that was backed up and accessible to all the systems.  The Iomega NAS worked great but once I got everything in one location, I realized that I had a lot of duplicate pictures between the three systems I merged together.  I started looking into writing an application to help de-duplicate the files but before I got too far, I took a look at what freeware was out there. 

I tried a few of the applications out there, but quickly settled on Duplicate Cleaner.  It is a nice little app that quickly searches your directories for duplicates based on different (and configurable) criteria.  While there were some other apps the specialized in images and others in music, this handles music, pictures, videos, and documents.

The guys at DigitalVolcano really saved me some time compared to writing something and I appreciate they didn't try to charge me $50 for something I only need to use every once in a while.  Some of their other apps on the site seem a little odd, but what ever floats their boat.  This one is a nice light weight app.