Duplicate File Finder is a free application to find and remove duplicate files. It supports unlimited number of files, folders and drives. Duplicate Finder will find duplicate photos, songs. Cleaner-The Duplicate File is the most comprehensive duplicate file for your Mac. It quickly scans your hard drive to find all the duplicate files on your Mac. You can then selectively choose which duplicates to delete and free up precious space on your hard drive. Gemini 2 identifies duplicate folders, pictures, applications, music files, documents, and videos on your Mac and helps free up space by eliminating them safely.
Stevey asked the Answer Line forum for advise on finding and removing duplicate files.
A hard drive is like a family garage--junk expands to fill available space. An SSD behaves very much the same way, but with less space.
A good duplicate file finder will help you reduce your digital junk levels. It can search for files with the same name, the same size, and/or the exact same contents. It helps you examine each file and decide which one to keep. It can ignore small files, so you can concentrate on the more wasteful redundancy.
I'm going to recommend two such programs, both free for non-commercial use.
[Email your tech questions to answer@pcworld.com or post them on the PCW Answer Line forum.]
All things considered, I recommend Digital Volcano's Duplicate Cleaner Free. The attractive, three-tab interface allows the program to provide plenty of options without overwhelming you.
When preparing Duplicate Cleaner for scanning your drive, you can have it examine or ignore file content. You can tell it to consider files with the same name, with similar names, or to ignore names completely. It can also match files by the Created and Modified Dates. A special Audio Mode tab helps you find duplicates of the same song by title, artist, and other such data.
If your hard drive is so overloaded that you hesitate to install even a 5MB program like Duplicate Cleaner Free, go with this old but still workable version of Easy Duplicate Finder. It's portable. You can download it on one computer, put it onto a flash drive, insert the flash drive into your PC, and run it without putting anything on the hard drive. It's not as versatile and easy to use as Duplicate Cleaner Free--or for that matter, as the current version of Easy Duplicate Finder, which is a reasonable alternative to Duplicate Cleaner.
But this old, portable version is not difficult either, and it works. It also has, oddly enough, an icon that makes me think of a public restroom.
Either of these programs should help you free up significant drive space--although you will have to face some decisions that only a human can make.
Searching for duplicate photos has its own challenges and requires specialized software. See Find duplicate photos for more on this. And read the original forum discussion.
Note: This article was altered on April 9. I corrected an error confusing the old and new Easy Duplicate Finder programs.
Duplicate files are the bane of my existence. Aside from using disk space, these files do nothing but clutter up your drive, make your PC run slower, and increase the difficulty level significantly when it comes to finding the right version of a specific file: is it the one I just updated, or the other one?
Using a free program that comes pre-installed on a lot of PC’s, CCleaner, you can perform advanced search and destroy missions that free your drive of unwanted clutter. You don’t have to install the Pro version to clean these files, any version will do. We’re using the Free version for this tutorial.
1. Open CCleaner.
2. Select Tools from the left sidebar.
3. Choose Duplicate Finder.
4. For most users, running the scan with the default selections is fine. You can, however, alter these searches by checking or unchecking the provided boxes, and selecting new sizes in the drop-down menus.
5. Choose the drive or folder you want to scan.
6. Click the Search button to start the scan.
7. Select the files you’d like to remove (carefully). Once you complete the next step, there’s no turning back. These files are gone.
8. Click the Delete Selected button to finish the operation.
More Tips