I believe I had this product or its forerunner long ago, and as some of you evidently have, I carelessly lost some data I was sorry to lose back then. A sadder and slightly wiser man, I then wrote to advise anyone using it NOT to run the application if he is tired or not alert for some reason. But then as now I was impressed with the amount of data that the application could evaluate, and the feedback that I could get from it BEFORE making any disposition of my files.

This is a very complex application capable of comparing files down to the tiniest shred. Using the most elaborate of filters, I set it to work on an 80 Gig external firewire drive that had about 72 Gigs of backup data on it. It finished analyzing all the data in about 6 hours and 20 minutes. Naturally a less stringent filtering setup would have run much faster, and probably most people will be able to accomplish everything they want to do with a brisk run of the Wizard. With the results in hand one is able to free up space intelligently and with a minimum of risk: but as most of us have learned by miserable experience, you can't have your cake and eat it too. So it will pay the owner to think through exactly what he is doing--he will be aided by help, by a manual, and by buttons which will explain their function when the cursor is passed over them.

Remember when you use this application that you are functioning as the Destroyer: more than one step is necessary to destroy files, I think the developer has written in excellent safeguards, but the fact is, once you have committed to destroying files, they WILL be gone. And not until then will the space become available again for other data.

Seeing the files laid out before you, you may be reminded of things you knew but had perhaps forgotten: that some duplicates exist, for example, because different applications treat the same file in different ways: iPhoto imports an image and sorts it by date into folders it generates, while GraphicConverter, for example, imports it and sorts it by name. Each application seems to want its own copy. It is a nuisance if you use more than one application for image manipulation or storage; but if you have only one copy of an image on the hard drive, you will have to reimport it to the application each time you want to use a different application if you do not retain the dedicated duplicate. You do need to ask yourself whether in that case space is more valuable than time, as you know how long it takes to import any image to any application.

Tidy Up! is a valuable tool, and I think an excellent one. But it is also a powerful one--stay alert! It is the very chainsaw for a massacre!