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Comment Prioritize by file size (Score 5, Insightful) 440

Since the objective is to recover disk space, the smallest couple of million files are unlikely to do very much for you at all. It's the big files that are the issue in most situations.

Compile a list of all your files, sorted by size. The ones that are the same size and the same name are probably the same file. If you're paranoid about duplicate file names and sizes (entirely plausible in some situations), then crc32 or byte-wise comparison can be done for reasonable or absolute certainty. Presumably at that point, to maintain integrity of any links to these files, you'll want to replace the files with hard links (not soft links!) so that you can later manually delete any of the "copies" without hurting all the other "copies". (There won't be separate copies, just hard links to one copy.)

If you give up after a week, or even a day, at least you will have made progress on the most important stuff.

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