Duplicate files deleter software helps you dash off some more space by eliminating copied or

unnecessary files in bulk. This software gives forth truly what you would presume based on its

name, and it does it effectively and quickly. You would not believe how much space it raids off.

You can use DuplicateFilesDeleter, it is fast way to find and delete all duplicate files Smile | :)

I ran prog. It found 26,000 dulpicates. It has been running now for 20 hours and has deleted 11,000. I disconnected from the internet and closed all other progs. I am now using another laptop. So it is pretty slow !

I would have to agree with just about everybody here!
Bubba knows what he is doing and does not make a comment without reason: Yes, you SHOULD be absolutely sure you know what you are doing when deleting duplicates - you need to be aware of system files and what duplicates are normally found on x64 machines.
Now if YOU have created (or downloaded) these files, you can be sure that the ones you have created or downloaded are safe to delete. But beware of deleting ones in other folders that you didn't create/download.
Thus TSSI Support is also correct in that there are some files that it is useful to delete - howewer, just be sure you know which ones!
Giovanni (as usual) has made some great comments. Especially Auslogics they make some good stuff. And note rics comment about the latest version too.
And Horst, great comparison, demonstrating the fallacy of believing in such software. you've put the lie to it!
I'll stick with Auslogics.

Just a tip for using any duplicate file finder. Searching by dates is nearly useless because the very same file can have different dates displayed in Windows Explorer.

I am looking for a file compare that will also use EXIF data to compare photos. Any suggestions?

I will try today's program. Contrary to some of the posts, it says it matches based on content, not just size. Maybe there's a setting to choose how you want matches made?

Like a few others, I'm currently using AllDup. I've tried many of these kinds of programs, and think AllDup is one of fastest, most feature-rich and accurate programs. A real work of art. I've grown to trust it to the point I don't even do a visual check of duplicate pictures any more. It's free, does searches as wide as several drives, or as narrow as a one or a few folders. Settings let you pick what kinds of files, names, etc., and how to match. Very extensive set of things you can DO with all the matches. Very flexible. With great power comes great responsibility, so make some test folders and add a bunch of files and several duplicates so you can play around. It hss a complex interface until you've used it a few times. Today's offer, Duplicate File Finder 3, may be MUCH easier for some. Try them both and and see see what meets your needs!

It really is a Fatal Design Error.
It is an error because it does not reflect the normal expected usage of the tool by everyday users.

It is the fault of the the software project manager who directed the program coder that he wants the software to work in a particular way.

By designing such that it only allows entire drives to be searched, shows that the person planning the design, has not even a basic understanding of how and when a user may want to search for duplicates.

It is like designing a car with square wheels.

How can one insist that the user search through a (say for example) 2TB drive; when the user already can identify 2 specific small folders that may have duplicate files. Then you force the user to take a total shotgun approach and search the entire hard drive.

This is incredibly stupid software design.

Other users have already pointed out and proven that it failed to compare by content. It seems to compare and identify duplicates on the basis of file size. Then not only in terms of Fatal Design Error, but also in operational terms, this software is a failure.

Installed and registered fine on Win 7. Ran on HP Pavilion, Quad Core Intel processor, 8 gig of Ram, one TB HD. Took 39 minutes to scan 396 Gig, 343,092 files in 41,600 folders and found NO dups. Ran Glary Utilities Duplicate File Finder and it found 26 duplicate files. Glary only looks at names and file size but still how could Duplicate File Finder Plus 3.0, miss all of these? File filters were set the same. NOT a keeper.

Tried to-days program on a small external disk. It made the dis so hot I had to cancel it after two hours. No results up to that time.

A pretty useless piece of software it seems to me.

#59 XP-Man
THANK YOU! Finally a review which also shows smart consideration for whether the program can do what it claims. Your testing with a single byte changed - brilliant.

Knowing the speed versus rigour trade-off, I probably WOULD try software (such as the one you were working on), if it meant accurate and solid results.

Cheers

Delete a dup file that may be intwo different folders and you may have software that will not run. Know what your doing before you delete something. with that said, these are great for pics and music etc.

I often look at Giovanni's alternatives an after one use showed a possible virus condition on the website of the GAOTD offering I decided to try the following as I have lots of duplicate images and ebooks with different names.

"* Soft4Boost Dup File Finder
As this GAOTD can find and remove useless duplicate files from the HD of your system, comparing files not only by name but also by content. This way you can detect two identical files (for instance mp3 tracks or video files) with two different names: cool, isn’t it?

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/File-Management/Soft4Boost-Dup-File-Finder.shtml"


Verdict - Absolute rubbish - won't even select the files I want to search and the help (or support as they call it) is even worse as it does not show you how to do it.

This has totally put me off Giovanni's suggestions forward, as my question would be does he actually use any of these or just read the guff and decide as it is free it must be better than the GAOTD offering?

Anti-Twin is another good and free finder : http://www.joerg-rosenthal.com/en/antitwin/

Total Commander http://www.ghisler.com/ Alt+F7 search Advanced Find duplicate files: same name;same size;same content.

Having downloaded and installed it on Win 7, 64 without any problems, I then tested the programme by making some tricks (cloning files and keep at different folders, plus changing the file names, plus changing "a bit" of the content...). The result was not so bad, but it took so long (ca. 5 min for all the drives, all types of files, all sizes...). It seems that the software search duplicates mainly based on the file size?

@21. I also prefer CCleaner's duplicate file finder, which is a new feature I recognized just less than a year ago. Based on 1 or more of the 7 conditions for file searching (name/size/modified date/name&size/name&modified date/size&modified date/name&size&modified date), you could fine-tune the search results and decide which ones are real duplicates and whether the real duplicates should be deleted or NOT.

Quite a number have claimed that it falsely finds duplicates this is at odds to when I compared an image file so decided to investigate further.

I have my own duplicate file finder which I wrote some time ago that checks content, however it is very slow as it checks every byte. I have been trying to think of methods to speed up this checking and today's offering was a bit of an eye-opener.

To be doubly sure of its accuracy I took a video file of 800,000 bytes and changed just one byte in the data area, today's offering failed to notice the difference and claimed it was a duplicate.

My program showed a huge difference in the hash value and so did not mark it as a duplicate but it took a few seconds just to compare the two files.

Unfortunately, this shows that today's programme cannot be relied on and so I will be removing it from my machine.

#28 ric .
Just because you do not like the concept of a program does not mean you can claim it has a “FATAL design error.”
Writing such nonsense will only put developers of allowing this site to publish them, certainly none of my programs will be published here.

Portable DirectoryWatcher 1.2 (LFV)
http://homepages.pathfinder.gr/nsiolios/dirw.html

Portable DoubleKiller 1.6.2.82 - Find Duplicate Files
http://www.bigbangenterprises.de/en/doublekiller/

Portable Duplicate Commander 3.0
http://www.rayburnsoft.net/ ]

Portable SiriSoft FileFinder 3.1
DOWNLOAD LINK:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/PORTABLE-SOFTWARE/System/File-management/Windows-Portable-Applications-Portable-SiriSoft-FileFinder.shtml

Best still.... no question
http://noclone.net/

for their smart marking....
select to leave one copy of duplicates....
or more importantly... select the folder or folders where found from which to delete the duplicates.....
after years of photos and documents... you'd be surprised how many folders and drives....you've placed copies off in attempt to back up important files when in a rush
this software allows you to select from which folders or drives to delete the duplicates... and for safeties sake... leave one copy
haven't seen this anywhere else... have requested they feature their software here but looks like... not yet

after 48 minutes it said it was loading the results. twelve minutes later (at the one hour mark) I clicked on the interface and it went "not responding" for about 30 seconds after which the results page popped up

unchecking tiny sent it into "not responding" again as it reloaded the info (should have just hidden the unchecked stuff)

too slow loading results but faster than expected at 61 minutes for results

Tried this out on a Win7 HP i7 12 TB machine with a 1 TB drive.

Total scan: 5 mins. for 700 GB of data. It found a LOT of dupes (8000 total and at least half of them are from my Steamapps folder).

So what this program does is present a massive amount of search results and leaves you to look through every file. It's helpful, I suppose, but here's the bad parts:

- You cannot sort by alphabetically ordered file name, path, or even file type, only the file size.

- You cannot choose the folders you want to scan, it will scan the entire drive every single time.

- There is no image preview option for pictures, (there is not many helpful config options at all)

Good parts?

+ It successfully found every single duplicate file on my computer

+ It searches extremely fast through huge amounts of data on a non SSD medium

+ You can choose to search for files by their size to avoid tiny or huge files

Well, I will check out Giovanni's (thank god for that dude) alts and see if one has a folder scanner. The lack of sorting options and folder scan choice makes this program a flop for me. There is no way I'd pay $30 for something like this! I don't have time to sort through 8000 files from my Steamapps folder and dig for real dupes between all of that mess.

Ups! I forgot to attach link to the software I was talking about. Sorry. Here it goes.
http://www.joerg-rosenthal.com/pl/antitwin/

Encouraged by many alternative offers presneted here, I enclose one more – free for non-commercial use. The software is not promoted so much as other purely commercial offers, but in my opinion it’s simply a gem! Just go and see, whether it fits your requirements, or not. The author, a German programmer, simply seems to be an intelligent and thoughtful person

I’ve been using it for a long time to remove image and document duplicates.
Advantages: generally – sofware designed very carefully from the user’s point of view: broad range of options to select source folders, type of files to compare, compare method (binary, pixels etc.), window for automatic simultenous lookup of each group of duplicates, several options to mark grofiles for deletion automatically (by folders, names, dates etc.) with weights attached to each factor, so selection what to delete is virtually yours.

the results of comparison are 100% reliable. Obviously, the speed of comparison cannot compete with those light programmes that do not read files thoroughly, but that’s the price for reliability.

Needless to say, I am not related to or interested in etc. promotion of the site and the author. I share my experience simply because I found this software just incidentally I find it really, really good.

I've got a total of 101,066 epub files.
Half are sorted by author, the other half in one folder.
This program went through the drive storing those files and didn't find one duplicate. Yet I can go in and manually delete duplicates in the same "author" folder, some titles have 7-8 duplicates, none of which were flagged.

It did however flag the system files in 1000 small games.
That in itself is funny - each game requires that file in its separate and distinct folder.

Giovanni: I've also tried everything you've suggest both now and in previous posts, and I get the same results. No duplicates in my epub files that are at least 40% duplicate. ie: out of the 100,000 plus files roughly 40,000 of them are duplicates, it's just a matter of finding them.

The only way I'm going to be rid of the duplicates is to do it manually.

The best results I've ever had was from a program called "1-click Duplicate Delete for files", that's what pared my epub folder down to its current size.

One suggestion I would have for the developer, allow for the selection of one or 2 folders, rather than having to select the whole drive.

Can this, or any other dup finder do this:

Given a target drive/folder/fileset, find all the files matching in another target drive/folder/fileset. I do not care or want to know about dups between stuff in target2.

As mentioned above I recommend AllDup. I spent a lot of time finding this.

http://www.allsync.biz/alldup_help/alldup.htm

The delete options are way better than anything I have ever found.
To enter a specific folder to search use the enter text option. The description does not really show how great it is. They should show a screenshot of the delete options.

The screenshot of today's giveaway does not offer any "smart" delete options.

I have found this utility to be excellent in both its graphic interface and available options for setting up a search (drives, size, types, etc.). Once a search is complete, duplicate files are color coded to make it much easier to locate and compare them. It also enables you to view properties of the listed "found" files.

I was skeptical as anyone at first, and although I like this program I would still recommend (as with any programs of this type) one to be cautious and try it out on less important files at first to get a feel of the program. Maybe most users don't need a program like this but as someone who has accumulated and saved many files over the past few years, it certainly helps me weed them out and free up my hard drive space as I certainly would have kept putting it off otherwise if not for this program. Thumbs up from me!

Adding to my previous quick & dirty review (#15), after fiddling on a 1.5 TB partition filled (90%) with video, audio and image files.

As as said before, it's fast: took 15 mn to scan the drive. This is the only reason why this software is good to keep. Especially if, like me, you've got many files spared onto several external disks.

The GUI could benefit from a much better conception. For example, if you leave by mistake the window's results, you can't get it back ---you'll have to rescan... I won't go into detailing the missing features and options because eventually they're not needed: the only way to use this GOTD is to check for removal only the files that have matching names, dates and sizes ---and forget using it to detect duplicates...

P.S. Not sure what the Glary free one will do. Haven't had it forever!

I use Glary Utilities Pro (Version 2.56).http://download.glarysoft.com/gusetup.exe .. I do not like the newest version (3.94)....- Duplicate Files Finder, (a giveaway from this site many moons ago)that actually gave away a lifetime license.
I'm not knockin' this product, in fact I did not even install it. Just saying, "I got one that will do that" I'll be back tomorrow. Thanks for loading this old XP machine up with some nice software!

Win XP
Version 3.0

Tiny little thing, less then 1 MB in size.

It can only scan entire drives?
No way to have scan only select directory(ies)!

So essentially no file/directory filtering.

No provided help in the program itself, only online.
The Help button opens Internet Explorer regardless of your default browser.

Results list is only sorted by size.

In order for the Properties button to be effective, you have to actually checkmark the file.
Simply highlighting the file is not enough.
(Likewise for all of the rest of the Results list buttons!)

The only manner to select files for deletion is one at a time.
If you have 10 dups, not a big deal.
If you have 1000's of dups, just how are you supposed to go about it?
(At least there is an Uncheck All button.)


> "Compares files based on file content, not file name, last modified date or file size."

That is absolutely INCORRECT!
Best I can determine it is SOLELY finding duplicates based upon file SIZE.


NO ONE SHOULD PUT ANY FAITH IN THIS PROGRAM'S WORKINGS.


If you think you are deleting "true" duplicates, you are sadly mistaken!

Very poor GUI... which equates to low confidence... uninstalled

Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder http://www.duplicate-finder.com/photo.html

Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder is a free powerful tool, that helps you to find and remove duplicate photos on your PC. With this program you can easily clean up your photo collection from duplicates or even similar images.

@39

Additionally, Everything has a "dupe:" function.
(Help | Search Syntax)

Two of the most powerful:


"Duplicate Cleaner"
http://www.duplicatecleaner.com/index.html

Comes in both a free & paid version.


"AllDup"
http://www.allsync.biz/alldup_help/alldup.htm

Free.

It does not compare be content.

My images Papaya Leaf-16.BMP and Papaya Leaf-128.BMP have different names, different modification dates but the size is the same 17.2 MB. The program listed both as duplicates. I suspected, that they were different images, so I checked with F5 visually, and they were easily to see different. So I checked with MD5 & SHA Checksum Utility 2.0 and I inserted the results below.


My images File: D:\A\A2-PicA-EB No Year\Papaya\2010 Papya leaves\Papaya Leaf-16.BMP
Size: 17.2 MB
Date modified: ‎Thursday, ‎September ‎2, ‎2010, ‏‎2:46:16 PM
MD5 Checksum: BCEF07EA3145551F6FBCEB860A709035
SHA-1 Checksum: 1F43EED9A7AD7B4C1464E6B07A2F9F8A8CECC998
SHA-256 Checksum: 9285964895DD5369EE9A15B14F5D060CDE366C67C3BC76DDA00E7E49068F4CC5

File: D:\A\A2-PicA-EB No Year\Papaya\2010 Papya leaves\Papaya Leaf-128.BMP
Size: 17.2 MB
Date Modified: ‎Thursday, ‎September ‎2, ‎2010, ‏‎2:38:01 PM
MD5 Checksum: 78CC9B02A08D7795D65A4AE18EEE06BC
SHA-1 Checksum: 3A8EEC22ED19E8EB81E325F0A7F50A003C8ACE6C
SHA-256 Checksum: F48410C3752EA7D8E116F895CC4E13B36FD006CB5BED20C10CC16F5418A72658

As you can see, all three check sums are different, which is proof, that the content is also different. So be careful, by deleting files, of which the program claims to be duplicates.

The Program is only so fast, because it does not calculate a check sum of every file, and comparing it with all other files.

Horst Dammer

I don't generally worry about duplicate files, but if I did I would probably turn to Search Everything, a little-known but fantastic utility which can give you a sorted and instantly-searchable list of every file on every NTFS drive you have in a few seconds (it uses the built-in drive file name index of the NTFS file system). I would just sort in order of file name and look for duplicates of the files I was interested in.

This is one time I am going to comment and it is negative. I installed and ran the duplicate finder. Pain to have to check everything, but I did that needed to be deleted. Then clicked on the delete, everything said that I did not have permission to delete. Wrong. I will stick with Puran Utilities, I don't have to go and check all the ones to delete, and I don't get the messages that I don't have permission to delete so and so file etc.
I definitely give a big thumbs down on this.
Thank you

A handy tool, but needs improvement. Initial window is too small and confusing - I picked the wrong drive. Results window could resize and check duplicates, but did I ever get an overload. Intel SSD toolbox gave me a new PDF with each update. My AV program gives me two DAT files at the same time in different locations. Do I keep both? Some
results gave 3 files in different locations, when I thought I cut and pasted them to organize the files. Need to drill down from the big picture and scan individual folders or file types. It would be nice to compare/preview video or picture files that might have some differences, before dumping one. I had planned to do this manually, but it would take time and effort. Thanks to ric, giovanni and others for their alternate selections. I will be needing a second program to
actually clean up what is found in this one, so I don't mess up.

OK, I understand about removing duplicate files, especially on the same drive. But what if you wish to synchronise files on the cloud, a USB drive or backup media? I hope GAOTD will offer some software to synchronise the same file names in separate locations.

I'm just sayin' ....

#29 qazwiz
Just to clarify matters, Windows Explorer on one of my systems is acting and up stopped the program putting the list of files in the window.
When testing on another system I had no problems.
#28 ric
“FATAL design error,” for God sake you mean you don't like it!

21. You ALL have C/Cleaner. Right?
Look under ‘Tools’ and you will find a duplicate file finder.
Comment by rizla01

Thanks for your post; I never knew!

Utterly rubbish. It doesn't look for duplicate files it looks for files that are exactly the same size. Even then it doesn't even look properly. If 2 files are in the same location and lets say 700.2mb it will say they are the same file.

Do not download.

P.S. If you don't have Outlook or similar do not click on the mail icon or you get the infinite browser problem...you are warned.

1. One should only check for duplicates within/among folders that DO NOT contain system or program files. That is, files that YOU put on your hard drive.

2. The duplicate file finder should find duplicates based on the EXACT Byte-by-Byte comparison, not just by checksum, etc.

3. It should not find duplicates by comparing file names.

Leaves garbage after using its own uninstaller. So be sure to Revo it.

If you have a vast music library like me, let me recommend you Similarity. It's really easy to use and powerful, it examines the waveform of different tracks to each other. For example, I found several duplicates from one specific artist and a separate "the best of album" which contained the same music track with a different size and names. You can preview listen the duplicates and remove the inferior one.It's not freeware but the unpaid version only lacks some of the more advanced algorithms, no snake oil here.

Yes I know CCleaner has a duplicate finder but it "only" compares names, sizes and modified dates. I'm sorry I don't have time to review todays giveaway. But incapability to select folders and filetypes seems like a major flaw.

Not bad but it is an older version; Latest is version 5

RE #23: QUOTE
Re #7 XP-Man,

“Unfortunately, nothing appeared in the listing of names and places, this could be the fault of this program or it could be my Windows Explorer which has been acting up.”

Sorry, I cannot understand this exactly. The result listing contains the file names and paths. I don’t know what is the “names and places” as you said.

Thank you.
UNQUOTE

he clarified later (maybe was being moderated before you posted) his OS didn't report the file locations to the program so it couldn't display them

I assume that others can see the locations of the (possibly) duplicated files. since I am still running (at the 40 minute mark Norton just reported high CPU usage by the program)

Tested this software.
It has a FATAL design error - the software only allows user to specify the entire drive to check for duplicates. This is a NO_NO.

This fundamental failure reveals that the software developer did not understand the various situations or scenarios in which a user may want to search for duplicates.

It cannot search within individual folders of any drive.
It cannot identify whether there are duplicates within 2 specified folders.

I have recently used a software named Fast Duplicate File Finder (Free Vesrion) 3.7.0.1 by MindGems, that is much better than today's giveaway.

Fast Duplicate File Finder (Free Vesrion) 3.7.0.1 by MindGems, can search only the folders that you select. You can choose to also scan the sub-folders. It can identify duplicate photos by content - as long as one of the duplicate twin photos has not been rotated. It is accurate and fast.

while i am waiting for program to run will comment on the above misleading comments RE: time to scan
my C: drive is less than 200 gig but a scan of all filesizes all types EXCEPT "all other with extension" (which should include all file types that duplication is suggested, like the dll extension) after ten minutes it was still gathering its info. by fifteen minutes it is now comparing files (so the comment claiming no comparison checks is at least partially misleading also)

in defense of checking ALL SIZES i want to remind you of the size fallacy... a two byte file is not two bytes of file space. if it has 100 duplicates it isn't wasting just 200 bytes, it is wasting at least 100k and possible 200k, 400k, or even 800k (soon to be up to 3200k, or 3.2meg) depending on the sector size of your drive (as a rule: larger the drive the more bytes in the sectors)

it all adds up