Delete duplicate files in OneDrive

I figured it out!!! I’m having the same problem with multiple duplicates.. So, in Onedrive, click on the search bar at the top of the screen and search for “copy” .. Every photo you take has a unique file number/name or whatever. When there’s more than one copy of any photo, “copy” is automatically added by OneDrive to the file name .. Searching for copy will bring up every photo with the file name copy added to it.. All the files results show on the screen with the toggle button to delete the photos.

Hope this helps you or anyone else wondering what to do.. It worked for me.. But I did view all the photos, just as thumb nails, to make sure I was deleting what I wanted to

Hello,

I was signed into OneDrive via my personal account also my work email account. I removed my personal account because it ran out of space and am now using my work account only. I had previously copied my Documents, Desktop, and Pictures folder to the sync folder for my work and it created two copies of all of my OneDrive files, which is taking up double the space on my computer.

I saw a previous post regarding this, which appeared to have an automatic way to remove duplicates:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/duplicate-files-on-onedrive/94a4a7db-98ed-46b6-8592-c40f3c847dfe

The post was created about 9 months ago and the menus from OneDrive have changed since then. It sounds like the way that you are suggesting to delete duplicate files is to manually go through all of them and delete them one at a time. This would take many hours for thousands of files.

What is the official Microsoft suggestion about how to efficiently remove duplicate files in an efficient way? With all of the hubub about AI and Copilot, it seems odd that I need to go through every file on my desktop one at a time and delete them manually. Microsoft OneDrive messed up my files and filled up my hard drive so I am hoping that there is a feature on OneDrive to fix this problem in a sensible way. Please advise.

Rita, can you tell me where I can find your screen shots (referenced in your above reply on Jan 29)? Thanks!

Thanks for your reply, but need more specifics.

Not sure what you mean by OneDrive page? I can open OneDrive using my login, but I don't see MY FILES as such. I do see a list of my "desktop files" in OneDrive, but I then do not see 3 vertical stripes.

Therefore, I can't find drop down menu and select LIST, then select SORT BY.

I'm fairly new to OneDrive, thus need more specific instructions...Appreciate your help with this !!

Hi,

I understand how great it would be to have such feature in OneDrive but unfortunately, there is no direct way in OneDrive to view duplicate files.

However, you can try the following steps to delete duplicate files in OneDrive web:

1. Click My files on the left pane of OneDrive page.
2. Click the drop-down beside the three vertical strokes (select view options) and select List.
3. On Sort by, select Name or Size. Duplicate files will be displayed next to each other. Select the unwanted ones and click on Delete in the toolbar at the top.

I hope the steps above helps.

Best Regards, Rita.