dedupe-linker

Dedupe regular files on a filesystem by hard linking and a creating a content-addressible look-aside.

This defaults to sha1 checksums, but you can specify others like sha256 or sha512.

This also means that the comparison on whether something is a duplicate is based on checksum, and does not consider mode, owner, or xattrs.

This is really a pet-project, but changes welcome. And is only focused on Linux compatability, but changes welcome.

Install

go install github.com/vbatts/dedupe-linker@latest

The default look-aside base directory is in ~/.dedupe-linker, so the following would dedupe your home directory:

dedupe-linker -w $(nproc) ~/

Cleaning up from the look-aside needs only to check the links as a ref-count:

find ~/.dedupe-linker/ -type f -links 1

Then delete these files that only have 1 reference:

find ~/.dedupe-linker/ -type f -links 1 -exec rm -f "{}" \;