Walking through a tutorial is the easiest way to understand the Embroidery Deduper©
process. In this tutorial, we'll demonstrate how to clean up and eliminate duplicates in
your "downloads" folder.
For this example, let's assume that you have downloaded several new embroidery
designs into a folder called "Downloads", as illustrated below :
You may have downloaded a number of zip and RAR files, each containing multiple
formats of the same design. It is common practice for embroidery designers to include
several copies of the same design in a single zip file, to cover the most popular
embroidery formats.
Well, this could be a mess to clean up! Ideally, we'd like to automatically extract the zip
and RAR files and only keep the formats that we want. On top of that, get rid of any
duplicate designs we may have downloaded twice. After the downloads folder is all
cleaned up, we can then organize the embroidery designs using Windows Explorer.
Fortunately, this is very easy to accomplish using the Embroidery Deduper©!
To get started, open the Embroidery Deduper© and click the "Add Directory" button on
the main window. When the Explorer-like window opens, choose the folder in which
you've downloaded your designs, such as "c:\Downloads".
Next, we'll need to set some preferences in order to tell the Embroidery Deduper© how
to process the folder we've chosen. To open the preferences window, choose Edit-
>Preferences from the main menu.
First, we'll need to tell the Embroidery Deduper© what design formats we prefer most.
This is called the File Type Priority
, and can be set by choosing your type of machine in
the File Type Priority panel in the upper left-hand corner of the Preferences window. If
you have a Brother, Babylock, Viking, or Janome machine, you can use one of the
presets. If not, you can choose the "Custom" radio button and adjust the priority to your
liking. The formats list goes from top to bottom, indicating your most-preferred format to
your least preferred format. For this example, we'll choose "Viking" as our preferred
format.
Second, we'll need to specify what's known as the Dedup Level
, which is the number of
levels beneath the chosen folder in which duplicates are not allowed. As a rule of
thumb, if you're deduping a single folder and you don't want any duplicates in that folder
and any of its sub-folders, then choose a Dedup Level of 1. This is the level we'll use
for this tutorial. Choose a Dedup Level of 1 by clicking on the "1st Level" radio button in
the "Directory Level Depth For Deduping" panel in the upper right-hand corner of the
Preferences window.
The rest of the preference settings in this window do not typically have to be changed,
so just leave those alone. Press the "Okay" button to save your preferences.
To begin the dedup process, click the "Begin Dedup!" button at the bottom of the main
screen. You'll see statistics indicating the progress of the dedup job.
Upon completion of the dedup processing, a Summary Window
that lists the duplicate
and non-preferred files that were found. After reviewing the findings, click the "Delete
Selected Files and Proceed" button to delete the identified files and proceed.
If errors were encountered while expanding zip or RAR files, another Summary Window
will open that shows which files have been quarantined. These "problematic" files were
moved to the Quarantine Directory
, in which you can attempt to extract them manually.
In all likelihood, however, the files are corrupted in some way. You may wish to re-
download the corrupted files, if possible.
If any multi-part RAR files were encountered, an additional Summary Window will open
showing those files. Multi-part RAR files are a special kind of RAR file and are not
currently supported by the Embroidery Deduper©. Multi-part RAR files are left in their
original location. You may wish to attempt to manually extract these files.
Finally, the report window opens, allowing you to view a report that lists all duplicate and
non-preferred files, quarantined files, and Multi-part RAR files. The report can be
printed from your web browser or viewed at a later time, as it's stored in Log File
Directory
. After you have viewed the report file, you may click the "Finished" button to
return to the main window.
You are now ready to use Windows Explorer (or similar tool) to move your downloaded
embroidery designs into the proper folders.