subject: Speed Up Your Searches: Remove Duplicate Contacts and Files Permanently [print this page] Speed Up Your Searches: Remove Duplicate Contacts and Files Permanently
Every once in a while you realize that for whatever reason, you need to delete some files from your computer. These include everything from Firefox, Internet Explorer, or other internet browser cookies and cache, to the need to delete duplicate contacts, documents that you no longer want to keep, or to emails stored on your local hard drive in Outlook.
While if you really wanted to permanently delete files, you would have to actually overwrite the spot on the hard drive where the files were kept, this can prove tricky. The Department of Defense has strict regulations and a system they use to clean their old hard drives. They literally format them something like 14 times! Obviously this is more than what you would need to do, as they are trying to protect themselves from the resources of nations or corporations with evil leanings... but you can probably get away with formatting the hard drive a couple of times to make sure the files are gone to all but the most determined among us. Another thing you can do is to get a powerful magnet and break open the casing of the hard drive and do a few passes, that should completely delete in information on the disk.
But if you are after some of the more mundane types of file deletions like clearing Firefox, just make sure that after you clear them out of the browser that you check your Recycle Bin and empty it.
If you are trying to make sure that you have deleted files in Outlook and you are keeping them in a Personal Folder file, then where you were actually keeping them is in a single file called the .pst file. You can find this out by clicking on File, then Data Management, and you'll see your personal folders listed there and the accompanying location of the file. Now, if you just want to delete a single email from inside of this, you'll go to the folder through outlook and delete it, then go to Deleted Items and delete it from there, since the pst file is actually just a database what you'll want to do is go back to the Data Management screen, click on the pst file that had the email in it and then go to its properties, then under advanced, find where it says Compress and click it. If the pst file is large, say more than 1 gig, and you've deleted a lot of files then this can take a while, often over an hour. What it's doing is deleting the "white space" in the pst file so that when it's done, the size of the file will be no larger than the actual emails and files it contains.
If you are trying to delete duplicate contacts in Outlook then you would go to Contacts, then click View, hold the mouse over Current View and then select Phone List. Right-click the column header and select Field Chooser from the menu to get a list with the duplicate contacts. Then inside the Field Chooser box, click on the drop down and select All Contact fields and then Created. Drag and drop Created over to the headers and add it to the list and close the box. Then you'll want to click on the new header called Created. Go down to the first contact that you want to get rid of and select it. Then go to the last one on the list and click it while holding the shift key so that you highlight all of them. Take a deep breath and click Delete. Congratulations, you no longer need to delete duplicate contacts.
