massive job ... how to do in idImager?

You may have noted my posts on the Expressions section ... as that's what the wife's studio has used (the little they've used it) for their DAM app. I've got idImager on my rNeil stuff ... and wondering about whether to leave the missus on EM2 or move her biz to idImager for the massive task ahead.

Which is: the studio's image files are in folders by client, with sub-folders for "originals", those selected for showing to the client, the working files that were retouched for printing, and sometime another folder or two. Simple, so far. But now the fun begins ...

These client folders are spread around in multiple "parent" folders and folder-trees ... on several different drives ... some of which were originally the "main" location and some the "backup" location ... though as the employee handling this didn't have a written protocol anywhere, others have added things into the "backup" tree thinking it was the "main" ... oh, and because drives were near "full", other drives were chosen as the repository for the "newer" files, though clearly, not completely used for that ... some client folders (only a few, I think ...) seem to exist in only one place, and that can be in ANY of the drives with image folders; some seem to be in two places, so one would have been the "main" files at some point in time, the other the then-used "backup" drive; and many client folders are in three places. We're talking about somewhere near 2 terabytes of image files.

And wonderfully in addition ... some client folders include ONLY the un-renamed RAW files out of the camera (and were just made in the ingestion phase but not deleted after successful ingestion), some include the original images and a few edited/retouched images, and a different folder of that client's particular session may include the "originals", all the retouched images, and several that were upsized and other special work.

One of my many tasks ... is to straighten out this mess. I've got what we feel was the "main" folder-tree from 2008/09 moved onto the new "Primary Working" drive, and need to comb the rest of the images for ones to add in, trying to 1) make sure I've got EVERYTHING and 2) trying to keep too many gigs of duplications from mucking up the final results.

Any help or suggestions for accomplishing this will be welcome. Yes, I've read BOTH editions of Peter's book thoroughly and carry Bk2 with me daily. Any other specific dupe-finding software I would LOVE to hear about also!

Neil