Find and Remove Duplicate Files

With Duplicate Cleaner all your duplicate files are in good hands. It will scan, find and remove your duplicate and zero size files, all with a push of a button.

With the advance in computer technology, all storage media have grown in size reaching outstanding values (1, 2 and even 3 TB) giving users that much needed space to store all the desired data. Thus, the problem of duplicate files does not pose a real convern to users with this kind of storage space.

Still, users with older PCs or smaller storage space might need a cleanup every now and then, not only to free up some disk space, but also to keep their files organized. This is where Duplicate Cleaner comes into action.

This small piece of software will help you get rid of all your duplicate files in one sweep. The application is free of charge and very easy to use, making it a tool that you will hold on for some time. The latest version offers you to install adware components (Regitry Reviver), but you can uncheck this option during the initial setup.

It comes with a pretty intuitive interface that will quickly guide you through the file scanning and removing process. First of all you need to choose the paths that will be searched for duplicate files.

Before pressing the Go button you can refine your search for general or audio files, making it easier to target only certain types of duplicates. The Audio Search is specially designed to find all your duplicate audio files looking through all types of media files and even searching for duplicate Artist, Title and Album names in their Tags.

On the other hand the File Search will allow you to handle a wider range of different file types. It comes packed with some default presets (Movies, Music, Images, Text files or Office documents) that might spare you the time to write each extension you want to search for. You can also manually enter only the extensions you want to search at a time.

Duplicate Cleaner will quickly scan the given folders and will accurately find your duplicate files using the MD5 Hash algorithm (CRC32).

Drag and drop is another feature we found to be useful when you quickly need to add a specific folder and don't want to search for it through the given search path.

Duplicate Cleaner is light on system resources too. During our tests on 200GB of data, the CPU did not exceeded 10% (with an average of 5%) while RAM upped to 35 MB (with an average of 25 MB).

However during the scanning process the application becomes unresponsive and you just have to wait for it to finish its task before you can use it again. Another thing that got our attention is the lack of an option to pause or even interrupt the scanning process.

Duplicate Cleaner also falls short when it comes to show the estimated time of completion, giving you only a progress bar and the number of files that were processed.

As soon as the application has finished scanning your folders, it will show a notification window with the results. Also, all the results can be accessed from the Duplicate files window immediately after the scanning process is over.

In this window you can view detailed info about the found duplicate files (path, size, file type, MD5). By double clicking a file you can open it in its default viewer, if you have one installed.

To come in your aid, Duplicate Cleaner provides you with an Image preview option to quickly view the found images and take action accordingly.

To give you a hand in picking the duplicate files you want to delete, Duplicate Cleaner gives you the Selection Assistant. It comes with several options that allow you to quickly select duplicate files by audio tags, pattern, modified date/time, size group or master path.

Duplicate Cleaner will also display a list with All files Scanned and can find zero size files within the scanned folders. However keep in mind that not all files found as duplicates are safe to delete and you have to check this out before you press the remove button.

Some of them, as we saw in our test, might belong to important applications and will make your programs unresponsive or they won't work anymore if you delete them. This might prove to be difficult for simple users and challenging for the experienced ones, even annoying if you have a long list of duplicates that you need to check through.

Pressing the remove button gives you three options: delete the selected files, move them to another folder or create hard links. As the first two options might sound familiar, creating hard links means that you will be able to associate the selected duplicates with the original files so even if you modify the duplicate, the changes will reflect in the original file as well.

Duplicate Cleaner allows you to save the scan results in CSV format to use them at a later time. However, it is advisable to rescan the folders as the files may have changed.

The Good

Duplicate Cleaner can help you get rid of your duplicate files in a few steps. It has a comprehensive interface and little configuration to attend to.

You can choose to delete, move or create hard links with the found duplicates and zero size files.

The Bad

When you use Duplicate Cleaner you really need to know what you are doing. The application will find all duplicates, regardless if they are needed by a program or not, so you need to be extra careful on what you remove.

There is no option to pause or stop the scanning process and the lack of an estimated time of completion leaves you guessing an undetermined period of time. Also the application becomes unresponsive during scanning.

The presence of adware in the installer might bother you, but you can uncheck it and continue with a clean installation.

The Truth

Duplicate Cleaner is simple, but mainly oriented to the more experienced users. If you stick to scan only your music / movies / pictures folders it can easily work for the average Joe too. As it still needs more work, Duplicate Cleaner will help you get rid of your duplicate files in no time.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: