Find out what is actually on that drive.
Everyone has a drawer of drives they are afraid to look at. SiftDrive scans them, tells you exactly what is there and what is duplicated across all of them, cleans it up, and can sort what is left into folders that make sense — without deleting a thing.
Scanning and the full report are free, forever, and need no account. With Drives your files never leave your machine — a managed migration is a different arrangement, and that page says exactly how. Create an account when you want SiftDrive to remember a drive after you unplug it.
241,930 files · 1.9 TB
4,118 duplicate sets
212 GB reclaimable
$ siftdrive plan /Volumes/Archive 2019 --organize
moves 4,118 files → _SiftDrive_Quarantine
sorts 61,704 files → Organized/
deletes nothing
How it works
Three commands, and nothing is destroyed by any of them.
- Scan
Runs on your machine and only reads. It fingerprints every file by its contents, so a duplicate is something we verified rather than guessed from a name.
- Look
You get a report: where the space went, what is duplicated, what is worth keeping. Free, unlimited, on every plan — including the free one.
- Clean
Duplicates move into a quarantine folder on the same drive, with every move written down first. Nothing is deleted.
siftdrive undoputs it all back.
Cleanup is half of it
It can also put the drive in order.
Ask for it and the plan sorts what is left: music by album artist and album, photos and videos by the year they were taken — read out of the file, iPhone HEIC included — and everything else by kind. A format whose date this cannot read yet is named in the plan instead of filed under a guess.
Music gets its own pass: four encodings of one song are four different files, so no duplicate finder sees them. SiftDrive matches them on artist, title and length, keeps the best — lossless first, then bit depth, bitrate, sample rate — and says why. Copies nothing can separate are left alone.
Nothing is taken out of a photo library, an application, a software project or a saved web page; those work only whole. Everything that does move is written down first, and siftdrive undo puts it all back.
Organized/Photos/2011/IMG_0421.HEIC
Organized/Videos/2018/IMG_0042.MOV
Organized/Documents/2019/W2.pdf
· 2,117 tracks had no artist → _Unsorted/
Built for the drawer, not the desk
It tells you which drives you can wipe — and undoes any cleanup.
A disk cleaner sees the drive in front of it. SiftDrive keeps a catalogue of every drive you have scanned and compares them by content, so you can ask about a drive sitting in a drawer.
The answer that changes what you do with the drawer: “drive 14 is 91% inside drives 3 and 7.” That is a drive you can wipe and reuse. And when it does clean, every move is written down first and siftdrive undo puts it all back — nothing is ever deleted.
Archive 2019 · 1.9 TB · last seen 4 months ago
Photos HD · 900 GB · 91% also on Archive 2019
Camera card · 61 GB · fully backed up
One subscription
Everything SiftDrive can do, on every plan.
What a plan sets is how much you can run, not what you are allowed to run. Piles of files are piles of files, whether they are on a disk or in someone's Airtable.
Drives
Plug in any drive — external disk, SSD, memory stick, camera card — and see what is on it, what is duplicated, and how much space you would get back.
Airtable → Google
A frozen Airtable workspace becomes a searchable archive: every base, table, field, record and attachment, exported once, verified, and filed where people can actually find it.
Dropbox → Google
Years of media in Dropbox, moved to Google Drive with the metadata repaired, the dates recovered, and the whole library tagged so it can be searched by what is in it.
Offboard
When someone leaves, their mailbox becomes their successor's brief: who they dealt with, what they still owed people, what breaks in the next two weeks — and, if you want it, their mail copied into the successor's inbox.
Start with the drive you are most afraid of.
The scan reads. It changes nothing. You will know in minutes — and you do not need an account to find out.
One command, on the machine your drives plug into:
curl -fsSL https://www.siftdrive.com/install.sh | sh
One file into ~/.local/bin. No password, no sudo, and it prints how to remove it.
Read the script before you run it — it is short on purpose.
It runs on macOS and Linux, and needs Node.js 20 or newer (brew install node on a Mac, your package manager on Linux) — the installer says so before it does anything if that is missing.
Then siftdrive volumes to list what it can see, and siftdrive scan one of them. The report is yours either way;
an account is what lets SiftDrive remember the drive once you unplug it, and compare it against the rest of the drawer.