What to Do When Your Mac Hard Drive has a Load of Duplicate Files

Perhaps, you get used to that snappiness your Mac trotted out on day one. As you start your journey with a brand new Mac, everything seems so freakishly fast. However, the same things begin to slow down with time. You can attribute this slowdown to the depleting free space on your Mac hard drive. The problems of insufficient disk space are caused by overwhelming volumes of data stored on the drive. One of the prime contributors to this is the presence of duplicate files. These duplicate files can cause a serious impact on your Mac's performance

You may not realize when your hard drive gets cluttered up with duplicate files unless your Mac turns out to be slower than a sloth. These data redundancies on your drive consume extra disk space that can cost you several GBs of storage (especially if the duplicates exists in the form of photos, audios, and videos). Duplicate files are created when you backup data on the same drive. This can also happen when you unknowingly download the same email attachment more than once. Another typical case could be you download the same software on different partitions of your hard drive.

Your hard drive may quickly run out of space and may even lead you to a potential disk crash. Undoubtedly, removing duplicate files from your system can benefit you in several ways. The first benefit is that you can reclaim sufficient amount of disk space and utilize this space for installing other useful programs on your Mac. The greatest advantage of getting rid of data redundancies is a dramatic increase in your system performance. Mac uses free space on the boot volume for paging and other system-related tasks. If the system partition has decent amount of disk space, your Mac will certainly run at its best.

With Mac OS X 10.4 or later, Apple provides an advanced search utility named 'Spotlight'. You can use this tool to find files, folders, and applications on your Mac hard drive. When you provide some text in the Spotlight search field, the utility displays all the occurrences of this text on your drive. This way you can search for duplicate files, and then delete them. If this sounds like a daunting task, you can go for professional duplicate file remover software. They can help you speed up the process of finding and removing all duplicates existing on your hard drive. Further, they also support the latest Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.