Find Duplicate Files on External Hard Drive on Mac and PC
By: Jason B.
Tags: Utilities, How To, Mac, Windows 10, Software

This article will show Mac users and PC users how to find duplicate files on external hard drive, SD card and other external storage devices and get them removed all at once. An external HDD or SSD can provide lots of storage space to store or back up your files. It can also be used to transfer files from computer to computer. As with the internal hard drive on your PC or Mac, duplicate files may accumulate as time goes by. How do I find and delete duplicate files on external hard drive and the like? Please read on.

How to find duplicate files on external hard drive on Mac

It’s possible to manually find duplicates on an external hard drive in the Finder app on Mac, which, however, is tedious and likely to take a lot of time. The best method is to use an external hard drive duplicate file finder like Cisdem Duplicate Finder for Mac. The app is able to provide the following features.

Support both internal and external storage (such as an SD card)

Find duplicate photos, audios, videos, documents, archives and other duplicates

Also detect similar images

Remove duplicates from apps like Photos, iPhoto, Music and iTunes

Let you scan a single or multiple folders or drives at the same time

Make it easy to exclude folders and specific formats of files from scan

Allow you to handily view (by file type) and preview duplicates

Provide multiple preview modes, allowing side-by-side preview

Smartly, automatically select duplicate files for you to remove in a click

Also provide up to 8 rules to apply bulk selection

Offer multiple removal options including Move to Trash

Easy and quick to use

macOS 10.10 or later

Step 1. Connect your external storage device to your Mac, be it an external hard drive, SD card or a USB flash drive. And now you should find it on the sidebar in Finder.

Step 2. Download and install Cisdem Duplicate Finder. Open it. Drag the external drive or a folder on it into the app. Or, you can add by clicking the add icon. Click Scan.

Note: The app can find duplicates in a single location, between two locations or across more locations, internal or external.

Step 3. As soon as the scan is finished, you will find all the duplicate files in the window that appears. You can easily view them by file type such as Documents, Images and Music.

It’s easy to preview various file types such as pictures, videos, audios and documents. The first (default) preview mode is great for image preview. Before you delete duplicate photos on external hard drive, you can use this mode to conveniently preview and compare images side by side.

Step 4. This external drive duplicate file finder is designed to bulk delete the files next to which the checkboxes are selected. In other words, the selected items are unwanted items. To make things easy and quick, the app automatically select duplicates for you as soon as the scan is finished. As a result, you can directly click the Delete button.

To give you more control, this app also provides multiple rules for you to apply mass selection. It’s convenient and flexible. You can also do it manually.

Make sure that all the unwanted items are selected. Click Delete, and the unwanted duplicate files found on your external hard drive will be deleted permanently.

Note: If the duplicates were on an internal drive, they would be moved to Trash by default (instead of being removed permanently).

Tips

Before you perform a scan on your external hard drive or SD card, you can tweak settings to improve efficiency. Click the settings icon. You can change the general settings based on your preferences.

With the Ignore List feature, you can tell the app to skip specific folders (such as a backup folder) and types of files when it scans.

When the scan or deletion is going on, please don’t eject your external storage device, which is important.

This video consists of a basic tutorial and an advanced tutorial on how to scan for and eliminate dupes on external storage.

How to find duplicate files on external hard drive on PC

It’s the same case with a Windows PC. There are a number of software tools that can be used to find duplicate files on SD card or external HD on Windows. A SD card duplicate file finder or external drive duplicate file finder for Windows works in a similar way as the app mentioned above.

The app I recommend is Duplicate Cleaner. It takes five easy steps.

Step 1. Connect your device to a PC.

Step 2. Open the app and add your external device to scan for duplicates.

Step 3. View the scan results.

Step 4. Use Duplicate Cleaner’s Selection assistant tools to mass select unwanted copies.

Step 5. Click the removal button.

Note: If you are new to the software, you will probably be overwhelmed by its interface. Don’t worry. It offers a user manual with all the details you may need. This tool is powerful and worth checking out.

Conclusion

This is how to find duplicate files on external hard drive on Mac and PC. If you are an active computer user and have significantly large amount of files on your machine, you can get one of the two apps recommended in this article. They excel at locating and eliminating duplicate files of various kinds. In addition, they offer both basic and advanced features and options for different scenarios and needs.