To identify newer duplicates of files in the oldest archive, I used DoubleKiller Pro (DKP). But in the spirit of caution, I decided to preserve the parts of it that were not duplicated in any newer archives. I wasn’t sure I would ever need anything in the oldest archive. Another way was to get rid of files in the oldest archive that had identical copies in newer archives. One way to free up some drive space was to simply delete the oldest archive. (2) The next section reports the amount of drive space I saved using the method described in this section. Notes: (1) All drives discussed here were encrypted using VeraCrypt. I needed a way to make space for my newest periodic image of DATA. As detailed in another post, I used that drive to store periodic images of my DATA drive, as part of my Borg archiving process. Archives compressed in this manner would also present far more complications than Borg, for purposes of restoring an entire archive, as distinct from retrieving an individual archive file. Its need for exact duplicate files did not save as much space as Borg’s cluster-level deduplication, however. This whole process was simpler and more transparent than using Borg. I saved another 1% by formatting the archive drive using a 2KB rather than 4KB cluster size. Altogether, these two steps produced a substantially lossless compression amounting to only 13-22% of the original size of those two archive folders. I was able to repeat the process with the second-oldest archive, as needed, to make more space available.Īs an additional measure, I used WinRAR to compress, into separate archive files, each non-shortcut file remaining in these two oldest archives.

The best way to proceed seemed to be to compare that oldest archive against all other archives in a single operation, putting the latter in DoubleKiller’s “library” box, and excluding *.lnk files from comparisons.ĭespite error messages in some such operations, simply repeating the replace command for the same checked files – or, if necessary, for subsets thereof – did result in successful replacement, so that a later run of DoubleKiller found no duplicates. To make space on a drive containing archival folders, each of which was a backup copy of my DATA drive (for e.g., 2019, 2020, 2021 … ), I used DoubleKiller to replace files in the oldest archive with shortcuts to exact duplicates in newer archives. Saving Drive Space with Cluster Resizing and Solid Archives Using DoubleKiller to Replace Files with Shortcuts

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