How-To Geek
Fast Duplicate File Finder Identifies Extra Copies
One of the more tedious tasks in cleaning up your computer to reclaim hard drive space is finding and deleting duplicate files. Today we look Duplicate File Finder from MindGems, a free utility for finding and getting rid of the extra baggage.
Using Duplicate File Finder
This works with Windows 98 through Windows 7 so is a great way to clean up new and legacy systems. It has a nicely laid out interface for scanning and identifying duplicate files on a single computer or an entire network.
Add or remove folders to check in the folder screen then start a scan. It will scan the main folders and all subfolders for duplicates.
Scans are quick with ability to scan removable media such as USB drives, flash cards, optical discs, external drives, and network drives.
The duplicate files will be highlighted and you can open them up or preview them within the application.
One of the cool features is the ability to preview the dup files including text and binary docs, pictures, and audio.
If you have thousands of files it comes in handy to locate them in explorer.
If you are looking for a free way to easily find duplicate files on your computer or network, Fast Duplicate File Finder is definitely worth a look.
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Comments (8)
Programmer by day, geek by night, The Geek, also known as Lowell Heddings, spends all his free time bringing you fresh geekery on a daily basis. You can follow him on Google+ if you'd like.
- Published 06/17/09
What if the duplicate has a different filename? Will it still identify the duplicate?
Not working well for me. Ran it a couple of times with 0 matches (inconceivable!).
Copied some files to another folder so I knew there were duplicates. Ran it again and it then found 30000+ duplicate files, a majority being temporary internet files of 0 byte size.
Cleaned those up so I could have a fresh list to work from and now it’s back to finding 0 matches.
Sorry, this one’s not hanging around.
Yes, I tried it out myself, it found two images which were the same, but with different file names.
I think it should be mentioned to handle this and any other duplicate file cleaner with a lot of caution. You could end up, as a friend of mine did, with a massive amount of file and shortcuts being deleted. At the very least you need to check carefully just what is about to be deleted.
Mike J – there is an option to skip zero length files.
Alan W – there is an option to protect system files and it is ON by default.
The tool is extremely fast and works really well. I love the preview option.
Cheers.
duplicate finder 2009 done this job for me… btw its great tool…
I know software which has all described features but looks much better than this one.
Duplicate Checker – http://www.duplicatechecker.com
In addition Duplicate Checker has functionality for working with duplicate photos and images – preview bar and thumbnails bar.
Version 2.0 is out:
Version 2.0.0.1:
* Added new scan method for searching for similar files (available only in Pro version)
* Added filter files functionality, so you can exclude files from scanning (available only in Pro version)
* Added auto-check mode for smaller files sizes when searching for duplicate files (available only in Pro version)
* Added option “Delete empty folders” after scan
* Added option “Compare only files with equal extensions” which will increase the scanning speed when searching for similar files.
* Fixed auto-check when there are folders disabled for auto-check.
* Fixed previewing media files in the big preview window.
* Optimized memory usage and allocation, faster speed when scanning very large number of files.