Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
* Package name : backdown
Version : 1.1.1
Upstream Contact: Denys Séguret
* URL : https://github.com/Canop/backdown/
* License : MIT?
Programming Lang: Rust
Description : a file deduplicator
Backdown helps you safely and ergonomically remove duplicate files.
Its design is based upon my observation of frequent patterns regarding
build-up of duplicates with time, especially images and other media
files.
Finding duplicates is easy. Cleaning the disk when there are thousands
of them is the hard part. What Backdown brings is the easy way to
select and remove the duplicates you don't want to keep.
A Backdown session goes through the following phases:
1. Backdown analyzes the directory of your choice and find sets of
duplicates (files whose content is exactly the same). Backdown
ignores symlinks and files or directories whose name starts with a
dot.
2. Backdown asks you a few questions depending on the
analysis. Nothing is removed at this point: you only stage files
for removal. Backdown never lets you stage all items in a set of
identical files
3. After having maybe looked at the list of staged files, you confirm
the removals
4. Backdown does the removals on disk
----
There's obviously at least half a dozen file deduplicators in Debian
or out there already. But those all compete more or less towards a
different goal, claiming all to be faster or safer than their
counterparts.
This one takes a different tack. It helps users decide whether
duplicate files need to be deleted or not, using quite interesting
(and exhaustive) primitives. Those are somewhat hidden in the
screenshots, so i'll try to expand on the questions here...
First question:
> You have several duplicates with "copy" names in the same directory
> than their identical "source" (for example 20200929_125405 (5th
> copy).jpg and 20200929_125405 (copy).jpg). I can automatically stage
> those 21 duplicates which would let you gain 73M. If you accept,
> you'll skip 10 questions.
Other questions:
> The /home/dys/Images/201911 directory contains 167 files which are
> all present elsewhere. [...]
> The /home/dys/Images/201911 directory contains 2 identical files, each
> one of size 27M. What do you want to do with those duplicates?
> [1] keep VID_20210924_120421.mp4 and stage other one(s) for removal
> [2] keep réussite-railsbleus-01.mp4 and stage other one(s) for removal
> [s] Skip and go to next question
> [e] End staging phase
... and so on. Quite clever.
This should probably be maintained under some rust umbrella.
Same author as broot (#948483).
