Detect and Remove Duplicate Files

If you are like me you are probably downloading lots of files from the internet every day. Those files are using a huge part of my hard disk space and I had to make the decision to get rid of some of them to free some space for other files I´d like to download.

I also have a rather large amount of images on my pc, could well be over 30000 and I always had the impression that there have to be duplicates all over the place. Never had the time to manually check them and delete the duplicates, would take forever.

Therefor I decided to take a look at tools that compare and delete duplicate files automatically. I found two that suit my needs, one is more of a general duplicate finder and one is specifically for images.

Clonespy is able to locate duplicate files even if they have a different file name or size. Its freeware of course, simply unzip to a location and run the file. The program gives you some options how to handle the duplicate files, move them, delete them and exporting a list of the files without removing any.

The second tool which is unfortunately nagware is called Unique Filer. I have not found a freeware tool that is able to perform the same operations as Unique Filer. It is able to find images dupes even if the images have been resized, rescaled, resampled and color corrected. It also finds normal dupes of course, but that’s not what makes it so special.

If you have many images that you downloaded over the years I recommend Unique Filer to you, you can use all its functions without registering, but see a nagscreen all 10 files that you opt to delete. And those are a lot, from my 30000 files more than 5000 have been dupes..

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Monday November 14, 2005 -
Tags:duplicate-files, find duplicate files, remove dupes, Software, Windows

Responses so far:

1. Joe says:

   August 12, 2008 at 8:21 pm

   I use Duplicate Finder to find and remove duplicate files.

   It have more options to search duplicate files and easy marking system allows me to mark files very easily.

   Reply