I'm admitting defeat to the persisting Bad Gateway errors when trying to submit comments on the GOTD download page:(
I seem to be going against the grain a little today but....Wow! I'm impressed! Truly a GOTD gem!
My sort of software - Hardly touches the registry in any way. I think it only has need to add its uninstallation key (as well as the activation registration values). Disk Space Fan Pro (DSFP) keeps a record of the most recent scan (for each partition) in Docs and Settings\username\Application Data\DiskSpaceFan, and (until overwritten by performing a more recent scan) these histories can be viewed in exactly the same way as any concurrent 'live scan' you may have just completed. #7 bitlife - If you think about it, it's not really surprising, and probably desirable that you get the “File can not be deleted when viewing history.” message whenever you try to delete the duplicates in such a manner. My own Docs and Settings DSFP folder has already grown to about 100 megs, but I anticipate that for me these records will prove useful, and I'm happy to afford the space to DSFP.
I find the animated 'Ringschart' that portrays disk usage, very pleasant and responsive, as well as informative. I've already learnt something new! I've a 20GB partition where I house and install most of my grass-roots applications. None of these programs are very big, so my attention was soon drawn to the 'Driver Sweeper' utility which I use when updating my NVIDIA drivers - I was curious why it amounted to nearly a couple of hundred megs. I knew it sometimes kept backups of a couple of dlls and sys files when cleaning up residue driver files, but (thanks to DSFP) I've now also discovered that on one occasion an entire backup copy was kept of a legacy extracted NVIDIA driver installation directory, which was (unbeknown to me) permanently occupying 114MB within my Driver Sweeper backups. As I always keep my own copies of drivers elsewhere, I've now deleted the extraneous backup and reclaimed the wasted space. I suspect other lessons may be waiting for me to learn...
Very fast in scanning too - takes little more than the blink of an eye scanning some of my partitions, whilst the largest (and probably the most taxing) partition I've tested uses 55GB of a total capacity of 100GB, and takes no more than two or three minutes maximum to scan on my aging Athlon XP1900. This result was particularly impressive for me, as I knew in advance that I had a great deal of duplicate texture images amongst the 55GB of data being scanned. The DSFP summary informs me that a total of 165,797 files were scanned, and 1,980 duplicate files were found on this occasion.
Even in the history records, the list of found duplicates is viewable almost instantaneously with a single click, and the results may be filtered so as to display (say) just images, documents, or videos etc. (in much the same way that recuva uses filters). It's also very easy to add and configure your own custom filters - something I'm sure will prove to be very useful too. Nice previews of images are icing on the very tasty cake which for me is DSFP! You can right click and select the preview option, or use the Space key as a shortcut. (Not sure if it's a bug, or limitation of design? - but I found that the Space key shortcut worked fine for viewing duplicate images in a scanned partition, but would do nothing when viewing duplicates in a scanned custom folder).
Being cautious as ever, I haven't yet tested the actual deleting of duplicate files. But so far the program has in the main been running like a dream (on XP SR3), so I'm not anticipating any issues. There's even a failsafe method of deletion available, which gives you the option to substitute deleted files with shortcuts that get created for each, pointing to the file that remains on the disk.
Still much to learn - back to explore further - but a great program IMO. As I've been trying to say elsewhere - If you can't beat 'em join 'em - Thank you Disk Space Fan Team!
