App Profile: DeDuplicate - Cloud Cleaner

Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc. don’t have built-in tools to identify and delete duplicates.

If you store many files on the cloud, it’s very easy to lose control and flood your limited space! Especially since, nowadays, cloud storage services offer mobile apps with automatic backup features, and things can escalate quickly using them.

This app scans your cloud, searching for identical files and allowing you to delete all the extra copies! Saving space and tidying up.

How does it work:

1) You log into your account.
2) You choose which folder(s) to scan, or the entire drive, and wait a short while! The time varies with the NUMBER of files, not their size.
3) You review a list of all the duplicates that have been found, optionally choosing which ones to ignore.
4) You confirm the operation!

Other than the ease of use, the main highlights of DeDuplicate and its unique selling points are:

• it’s not resource-hungry: it doesn’t need to download the files to identify duplicates. Instead, it requests metadata about them from the cloud providers, using the APIs that they make available. So it doesn’t waste bandwidth, doesn’t need a lot of free space on your device and it’s very fast: less than 10 minutes for 100,000 files in the tests conducted during development. Of course, it depends upon the network connection.
• It precisely identifies EXACT duplicate files by comparing their “hash” values. If two or more files happen to have the same name and/or size, but different contents, they are not counted as duplicates. They MUST have the same content!
• The entire process takes place on the user’s device. There’s absolutely no data collection about your files on the cloud: the app communicates directly with the cloud providers, and no information about your data gets through intermediary servers.
• It’s cross-platform!

DeDuplicate currently supports:
(read the note about Google Drive below!)

• OneDrive
• Dropbox
• Google Drive (∗)
• MEGA
• Box
• pCloud
• Yandex.Disk

IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT GOOGLE DRIVE SUPPORT: due to recent changes in Google’s requirements for third-party apps, DeDuplicate currently does not have a “verified” status. You can still use Google Drive as usual, but logging into your account requires a little workaround!

WHY DO YOU NEED THIS APP?

When it came down to it, the only way to remove duplicates on the cloud turned out to be the time-consuming procedure of downloading everything to your computer to use one of the many utilities that delete duplicate files on the hard disk, “offline”. When done, the changes would have to be synchronized to the cloud; in the worst-case scenario, you have to re-upload everything from scratch. That’s not a viable option when you have over 500 GB of unorganized cat pictures :)

DeDuplicate is being actively developed. If you encounter an error, please take the time to contact us instead of leaving a bad review, it can be very helpful for both of us! Win-win.