100% Accuracy In Removing Duplicate Files on Your Computer

With a name like Duplicate File Finder Pro, explaining the purpose of the application makes it a redundant effort. However, what the name does not show is the ease of use of the program and its efficiency in picking up duplicate items without handing you false positives.

With hard disks of huge capacity being thrown on the market at ridiculous prices it’s no wonder that the file stock on the average computer increases at very high rates. However, this also increases the risk of storing duplicate data.

Duplicate File Finder Pro does not come free of charge and the price is $29.95 (EUR 23.53). You can take it for a spin without shelling a dime, but the app will impose some restrictions, the main one being deleting or moving a limited amount of files.

In our case installation was eventless and we were able to complete it quite quickly. However, it seems like the default install location of the software is not “Program Files” but “AppData\Roaming”; so you should pay attention to the screens if you want it in the regular folder.

Although it is not difficult to handle, the default configuration of the program starts a guiding wizard that takes you through all the steps necessary to find duplicate content on any area of the computer. You can disable this at any time, but I suggest going through the screens at least once in order to learn the ropes.

You can choose a job that scans the entire hard disk or just pick some specific locations yourself, which lets you select entire drives as well as folders. Some fine tuning can be applied by instructing the application to go through files with certain attributes or those within certain size values.

It can also skip zero-byte files. Additionally, Duplicate File Finder Pro can focus only on specific file types defined by the user. By not targeting all the files on the hard disk you can shorten the time required to complete the scan.

As far as comparison of the data goes, the program can be extremely efficient and show items identical in content beyond any doubt. This is achieved by running Bytewise algorithm, which performs byte-by-byte comparison, which indicates with maximum certainty if a file is a duplicate or not. The downside of this algorithm is that it is not as fast as the less accurate ones.

During our testing we noticed that the computer resources used during the processing were not out of proportions. In fact, the application used a decent chunk of CPU, with an average of 35%.

However, if this is too much for your machine, Duplicate File Finder can do its job in what the developer calls “CPU-gentle comparing” mode. The effects of enabling this are slower processing of the data with minimum CPU usage; in our case the CPU stress dropped below 10%.

In order to complete its task as fast as possible, the application offers the possibility to create ignore lists with folders and file types. These are already populated with entries, but you can customize them to better suit your needs.

At the end of the scan and the comparison you can choose the items you want to be removed from the hard disk. The file selector puts at your disposal criteria like age, length of the filename or size of the directory they’re in.

The application shows two options for dealing with duplicate content: “delete” and “remove”. It is pretty obvious that the first one removes the data from the computer, while the other simply allows you to move it to a different location.

A finer selection of the files can be obtained by enabling the advanced settings. These let you specify parameters like size, filename match or location path.

Everything is pretty much automated in Duplicate File Finder and you won’t have too much trouble customizing the way it works. You don’t have to worry about false positives as long as Bytewise algorithm checks the scanned data. The other algorithms also show high precision (99.9999999%).

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