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Replace copies with hardlinks

You recently switched to a proper setup that supports Hardlinks and Instant Moves (Atomic-Moves).

And you would like to replace copies with hardlinks ?

If your Operating System supports it you could make use of Jdupes.

Usage

We won't cover every command ‼

If you want to know what else Jdupes can do please read the manual.

Tip

This process can take a long time and a pretty big hit on your resources depending on the size of your library. We did notice the first time can take longer than the second time, this may be due to some sort of caching behavior on disk.

  • That's why we suggest doing it based on categories (Movies, TV, Music etc).
  • We don't suggest using this on a cloud-based setup.
jdupes [options] DIR1 DIR2

This will do a dry run and summarize at the end.

jdupes -rMX onlyext:mp4,mkv,avi "/data/torrents/movies/" "/data/media/movies"

This will hard link all duplicate files without prompting.

jdupes -rLX onlyext:mp4,mkv,avi "/data/torrents/movies/" "/data/media/movies"

Windows allows a maximum of 1023 hard links per file

Warning

The -Q or --quick option only reads each file once, hashes it, and performs comparisons based solely on the hashes. There is a small but significant risk of a hash collision which is the purpose of the failsafe byte-for-byte comparison that this option explicitly bypasses. Do not use it on ANY data set for which any amount of data loss is unacceptable. You have been warned!


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