Hands-On Tech 200 Transcript

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0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Hands-On Tech. It is a very Windows episode, so stay tuned. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech, the show where I, Micah Sargent, answer your tech questions and occasionally review a gadget or two.

Today we are kicking things off with a question that comes in from Richard. Richard writes in to say, in an effort to clear some space in my Windows 11 hard drive, which is close to filling up, I checked on some picture files and folders that I haven't looked at in years. I was surprised to find that in just about every picture folder, for every original picture file I saved, there are two to three separate copy files of the same picture. I don't recall ever saving duplicate files of pictures. What would cause this, and is there a quick way to delete these duplicate files? Otherwise, I'm gonna have to go through hundreds of picture folders to delete these duplicates. And, first and foremost, the reason why I want to answer this question is not only because I think I might have a few answers here for Richard, but also because, as always, this is an opportunity for us to talk about providing questions and details to help answer those questions. So, in a question like this, one thing that is incredibly helpful is knowing what different software you might have installed that ever touches those photos. So when you are doing your own troubleshooting to try to figure out what might be causing this issue, you likely are looking at the different applications that you have on your machine that might interact with these photos. Right, you might have a photo editing program, you might have a photo backup system running. You may have those different tools available, and so knowing what those are, looking through your applications and seeing any photo editor, any photo management solution that you have, and noting that in the email to me, is very helpful. And that is kind of an opportunity for people who write in in the future looking for assistance to be able to kind of hone your question a little bit so that I can give you the best answer possible. So, given that we're not sure what different systems and software are running on Richard's machine, we need to kind of take a broader look at things, which means that there are many reasons why this might be the case, why you're seeing multiple photos.

One possibility is that there could could I read reports of occasionally some strangeness going on with Windows Backup, because Windows Backup also has a recovery system. That's built into it a recovery feature, I should say. That's built into it, and occasionally when you're doing a recovery or restore of files, it can restore files that are not the original but copies of those original files. So the originals may still be there and it's then restoring newer versions of those. So if you have ever gone through, richard, and done a file restoration with Windows Backup, it's possible that that could be what's responsible for you seeing these duplicate files.

Another possibility is another feature that Windows has built in called Windows File History. This is a tool that lets you keep track of how a file changes over time and lets you then roll back a change if you ever make it. And so, as Keith's 512 is saying in the chat, is his machine doing versioning. That's essentially what file history is. It is versions of the file that have changed over time, and so it could be that Windows file history is responsible for this. I've linked to the support pages for Windows Backup and Windows File History that. I'd love for you to hop into those and kind of take a look at it and see if those could be responsible for what's going on with your system and understand that, even if you don't have Windows Backup or Windows File History that are playing that are causing this issue.

It could be one of these pieces of software that you're using. It could be your photo management solution that itself is doing versioning, and so every time you make an edit on a photo or a series of edits on a photo, basically every session of editing that you do on the photo, it could be saving those as new versions of the photo. And if you were to look at the file size, you might notice that, like the newer version is smaller and instead just has information about that original file. Particularly if you yourself do not have the file extensions visible, you might check to see if it's. You know it's a jpg file, but the two copies are not actually jpgs but are instead kind of information with the same name as that jpg file. So it is possible that that software that photo management software or photo editing software could be creating new copies of the photo or creating metadata that references the original photo and is instead doing that. Unfortunately, that's not the extent of it, because there's also the possibility that cloud syncing services could be responsible for creating multiple copies of your photos.

There's a lot of strangeness with cloud syncing because of the way that our modern operating systems have, over time, added syncing functionality to the base operating system. It used to be that on my Mac I would run Backblaze, which was my third-party cloud backup solution, and it would easily and very simply eat up all the files, and by that I mean ingest them and put them online in my backup with no problem. But after Apple added iCloud syncing for desktop and documents folders, and after I have enabled those features and Apple provided the ability to essentially store or sort of sync or reference files that are just stored in iCloud, that has caused issues over time where Backblaze is not able to access those files because they aren't local. And so, in that weirdness, sometimes, depending on your cloud syncing service if it is indeed a syncing service, not just a backup, where it's looking at what you have and making a copy of it elsewhere, but instead is looking at what you have and making sure that it matches elsewhere then that could be potentially wreaking havoc and causing issues between the two. So that could also be responsible. And yes, again, as Keith's 512 was saying in the chat, it may be that this is not a full size image of the original image, but your photo management software could be creating a local thumbnail of that image so that you have, like a smaller version of the photo and the larger version can be stored elsewhere. So it's messy and it could be any number of those things.

If, after auditing your system, you've determined, okay, it is truly not one of my tools, that is actually being helpful, but instead is just a copy, is indeed just somehow two or three copies of this have been made. Indeed, just somehow two or three copies of this have been made, and you have confirmed that, then what I recommend you do is use a tool to deduplicate these files. So you asked at the end how can I do this easily and quickly, instead of having to go through clicking into each one of these and try to figure it out that way? Well, yes, it's not difficult to do, I'm happy to say. I recommend a free and open source tool that is available cross-platform. So, yes, it will work on your Windows 11 machine. It's called DupeGuru. That is D-U-P-E-G-U-R-U.

Dupe Guru is a tool that helps you find duplicate files on your machine, and it also works with photos. So there's a special picture mode, as it's called, that cannot just find exact copies, which, in this case, you would probably want because you want to make sure that these photos are not basically some sort of photo management system that you're going to mess up by getting rid of them, but are instead exact copies. But in the case of someone who's actually trying to find duplicate photos, they tend to be looking for photos that are close to the original in some way and being able to get rid of those, doop Guru can do what's called a fuzzy search, meaning that it doesn't need the exact and precise copy, but can also look for other versions of the photo that are close. It's as if you are being asked to find the three instead of being asked to find the three red squares with yellow polka dots and bumpy texture in the painting. Right, and if you're looking at it and you have, you know, perfect 20-20 vision and a magnifying glass, you may find the three of those that are in the photograph. But if you were to sort of squint your eyes a little bit and let your vision go a little fuzzy, you may end up finding five, because there are some that don't have quite that bumpy texture but are close enough to those other images. That's kind of the fuzzy search there. It's just getting a little bit more laissez-faire if you will lackadaisical to be able to find similar but not exactly the same photos. So that is why I recommend using Doop Guru to help track that down. As always, richard, I love it when folks get back to me to let me know how it went. If you, in looking through this, are still kind of unsure and don't want to proceed with the Guru deduplication because you think it might be you know some software that's doing a thing or a service that's doing a thing, be sure to reach back out and let me know what is on your system that you are kind of concerned about, that might be responsible for this, and whether it's a good idea. You know to proceed and I'd be happy to help out with that.

Speaking of folks reaching out, we have a bit of follow up, but before that I've got one more quick little Windows question, and this was such a little easy one that I thought oh yeah, let's talk about it. So Lance wrote in with, I think, what appears on its face to be kind of a simple question, but it was worth it to kind of look into this. So Lance wrote in to say why does Windows 11 categorize CDs, dvds, blu-rays, mp3 players, cameras and USB thumb drives as removable. But when I plug in a USB hard drive it's not categorized or labeled as removable. And this was an interesting question because, yeah, if I'm plugging in a flash drive and it's shown as removable, but then in the same I unplug that flash drive and I plug a hard drive into it in that same port, you know, and it seems to be, it's like the same connection, it's just like a big flash drive. Why is it suddenly not removable but instead is fixed? What's the deal there?

So it turns out that Windows kind of takes its cues a little bit from the external file, or external, rather, system, and so Windows looks at how each of these storage devices identify themselves at the firmware level. Optical disks, mp3 players, cameras, usb thumb drives are in the firmware. They're able to kind of set a flag and the flag says I am a removable media. I am able to be, you know, removed and shuffled around and taken other places. Most of those USB hard drives that you come across, with few exceptions, are going to identify to the system as fixed disks. So Windows is not going to call that removable media because it doesn't have that removable media flag and instead has the fixed flag.

So the device's firmware paired with Windows classification criteria kind of work together to determine how that device is shown on the system. And you know that's by way of how these devices are set up what their intended purpose is. In effect, it's there to help make sure that you don't mess up your files, given the expectations that you would have for these devices, a thumb drive being something that, yeah, you're regularly going to unplug and plug into some other machine, versus something like an actual hard drive where the idea is that this thing stays plugged in for a while as some sort of backup system or, you know, as an external file source. So that is the reason why you're seeing two different versions there. And there's actually one more thing I want to add before we talk about Club Twit, because Out of Sync in the chat has brought up something very interesting Whenever it comes to these devices having this flag internally, about what kind of media it is, it also changes how Windows handles these devices at the OS level.

So Outofsync says I think removable mostly affects how the OS treats the writing like writing to the system, writing the data to the system, like if it should cache writes or commit them immediately. So, if you can imagine, if you've got something that's removable, you want to make sure that the user who may try to pull the plug on the file or on the device a little early is not going to mess up the data right, and it's more likely that everything's going to get to where it needs to go or, if it doesn't get to where it needs to go, that files won't be corrupted, something that trying to cache what you might be moving between is going to take up a lot of storage space, versus something like a little flash drive or a little hard drive or, excuse me, or a little, you know, sd card or a CD, whatever it happens to be, where caching it is not going to be a huge burden on your system resources. So that's another good little point there. Thank you Outofsync.

All right, let me tell you real quick, remind you really quickly, about Club Twit. twit.tv/clubtwit. For $7 a month you can join the club, but we have a great little promo running right now. You can actually join the club for free for two weeks to give yourself a little taste of what it's like to be part of the club. When you join the club you gain access to some pretty awesome benefits. Our biggest one, our most important one, of course, is ad-free content. Yes, you get to watch and listen to all of our shows ad-free. It's just the content, none of the ads, because you are, in effect, supporting what we do. You also gain access to the Twit+ bonus feed that has extra stuff behind the scenes before the show, after the show, special Club Twit events. Access to the members-only Discord server, which is an awesome community at this point where you can chat with fellow Club Twit members and also those of us here at Twit. Access to the ad-free video versions of our Club Twit shows so you can watch the shows ad-free as part of your membership, shows ad-free as part of your membership and, honestly, just that warm fuzzy feeling knowing that you are helping to support the stuff that we do here at TWIT. If you already are a member and you're watching live, so you're hearing this then I want to remind you that you can earn entire months of Club TWIT free by going to twit.tv/clubtwit/referral, where you can refer your friends and when they join, you earn months of Club Twit. So be sure to check out the club twit.tv/clubtwit and we thank you, those of you who are considering that.

All right, as I mentioned, love, love, love to hear back from folks who have written in in the past to see how things went or how things are going. And we got some feedback, follow up from Jack, who had asked about saving space in their Gmail storage, that they had gone through and deleted stuff but their storage was not reflecting the fact their Gmail storage was not reflecting the fact their Gmail storage was not reflecting the fact that they had done so. They even went as far as to look at the support documents for Gmail that said sometimes you have to wait a couple of weeks or even up to a month for the storage space to reflect the changes that you've made, and Jack was patient enough to wait the changes that you've made. And Jack was patient enough to wait and it was still not doing what Jack expected. Well, jack wrote in and we provided some advice on being able to find what was taking up the most space, and here's what Jack had to say.

I was surprised and pleased to hear my question about Gmail storage space woes on Hands on Tech. I had asked two basic questions Is there a way to view Gmail's storage with more granularity than provided by Google's tools, and is there a way to reduce the space used? Turns out you were correct Email attachments were the primary space consumers. But here is what Jack says there's a wrinkle to be aware of. You invited a follow-up with any additional information. I did indeed. Jack says there's a wrinkle to be aware of. You invited a follow-up with any additional information. I did indeed. Jack says I used a combination of Thunderbird and its import-export tools add-in to discover more details about the Gmail space consumption. This is, I love this, jack. I exported a CSV file which I analyzed with Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access Goodness, it's so nerdy. I love it To see what was consuming the space.

The real culprit, dear listeners, is inline photos within message replies because every reply contains a copy of the original photos. This can lead to huge space consumption when a message thread contains many replies that each contain several photos. I'm going to pause here on the follow-up to tell everyone, depending on the service or software you use for your email, you will have you could have an option to tell the software or the service to not include attachments in replies to original photos. So sometimes you have the ability to stop this from happening. But depending on what you're using and depending on to whom you are communicating, they may not have that turned on. Back to Jack's follow-up.

I subsequently found and I want to be clear Jack's going to mention a few bits of a few different services that Jack used. This is not me recommending these tools, it is just me sharing Jack's experience. So I have not audited and tested these tools myself, but Jack wanted to share what Jack ended up doing. So Jack said. I subsequently found a website called unattach.com which will remove the attachments after optionally downloading them, while retaining the message body. Unattach is smart about retaining only one copy of each attachment. When combined with some database selections, this can control the amount of space consumed by Gmail. Unattach is a commercial website with a pay-as-you-go tier that is very economical. So far I've been very pleased with it. I also found a free program called MailStore Home that will archive local copies of all email messages. When combined with your original advice about deleting old messages, archiving the old messages can help control the space consumption while retaining history for posterity. After archiving and cleanup, my Google Space went from 13.9 gigabytes to 6.9 gigabytes of the 15 gigabytes available. So I am back in the safe zone. Jack, I am so happy for you and I appreciate you for writing about the fact that, yes, photos in replies can end up taking up a bunch of space. Thank you also for sharing the tools you ended up using and I'm happy that you are now back in the safe zone when it comes to your Gmail storage.

All right, rounding out this week's episode of Hands-On Tech, just a reminder that next week, this show officially goes back into the club. So what does that mean? Well, it means that those of you out in the public who are listening to this show after the fact, you will be able to hear the audio version of the show with advertisements. If you want to watch the video version of the show without advertisements, you will need to be a member of Club Twit. That will get you the video version of the show with no ads. You, of course, also have, as a member, access to the Discord where I'm regularly chatting with all of you. You will be able to catch me still next week on Sunday as we kick off this new way of things. And for those of you who've been saying I want a longer show again, next week will be that longer show because I will be recording multiple episodes all at once, so we will have that fun experience of getting to answer a lot of questions, as I kind of put together the month of February for this show. So we'll meet once a month and I am looking forward to that.

Honestly, I just I really appreciate all of you who join me every Sunday morning in the club to have a nice chat and help out, because there are some great comments that you all share that are very helpful to the people who write in.

Continue to get in touch with me hot@twit.v to have your questions answered. I promise I'm working my way through. You're all writing in such great questions and some of them require a lot of research and testing. Some of them require just a little bit of research and testing. Some of them are problems that I've solved in the past, so they don't require much and you know, just trying to shuffle through all of those has been a lot of fun. Honestly, I really enjoy bringing the show to you and I very much love that. For me, being more public facing as an Apple knowledgeable individual, having a show that was pretty much all windows, is also a lot of fun. So thank you, and we will be back next Sunday for our new recording of this very show. All right, that is that, and I will see you again next week. Bye-bye.