Dear all,
Very sorry to have taken so long to reply to all your advice ! You have given so many great ideas, including tags which to tell the truth I had no idea what they were for :Blushing:
I had also never thought of using a second Finder window - again, it didn't dawn on me how it could be useful.
@Charlie, thanks for suggesting Path Finder, I will take a look and see if it is going to make my life easier.
@Ashwin, I agree that my file organization is not ideal, that's what I'm trying to solve
. Like you, I didn't want to put everything on iCloud in case I couldn't get to it while on travel (or simply outside my home office). So I stopped the iCloud sync in the middle (dumb) and now some files are there and some are not. And then I copied files/folders to a memory stick for use on travel - same reason as you but don't want to carry a hard drive around in my purse ! I could back all the memory sticks up to a HDD but then I would have even more copies of the same files.... or different versions of the same files.
Maybe the basic problem is that I use two computers, one that has lots of storage space and one (Macbook) that doesn't.
Maybe the use of tags, as suggested by Ashwin, will help me locate the duplicate files. Will the computer recognise different versions of a file with the same name ?
Bottom line : many thanks. Wish me the time to sit down and work this out.
Ann