I'm not a programmer; opened this account to comment on the thread titled "What would you like written today?"

So:

Biggest problem I have is too many duplicate files, directories, and directory tree branches.

How come? Once I gave up the punch cards, my first home computer was a Godbout CompuPro (CP/M-86, two 8" floppy drives). I've been saving text files since then.

So I've collected backups. Many are duplicates. Currently using Mac OSX.

What I'd like: Go beyond the usual "duplicate finder" approaches, work back through the directory tree to find groups of duplicate files.

Display as a tree, with the option to hilight branches that seem to be duplicates, or that overlap in content ("overlap" in different specified ways). There's an old Mac OS 7x application that does this quite well, I'd have to dig out the info, it's only a picture, without pruning tools.

Designate branches that seem to overlap; designate a new empty copy of that set of directories; open a window comparing one directory with another side by side as text files (the way something like Tri-Backup displays volumes to be synchronized -- if only it included 'delete' and 'rename' and 'move instead of copy' it'd do much of this).

End result -- new directory tree containing the sum of the old duplicate ones.

Or ... something like that. This can't be easy or someone would have done it. But it'd sure be helpful to be able to buy one new large hard drive, and use such a tool to scan all the other media and end up with a single consolidated file collection.