14 DAY TRIAL // It is hard to keep your computer clean with all the information floating around. And many times the exact same item may find different places on the hard disk, taking up free space until you discover the double an delete it. NoDupe has been created specifically for this job and it can detect duplicates in a specific area of the hard disk, even if the files differ in name.
The application is free of charge and getting it on the system requires only following the indications on the screens. It won’t bring in any other files than what it needs to function properly.
Looks are not impressive; humble even, a clear hint that the focus of the developer was more on the functionality of the application rather than aesthetics. All you get is a simple interface listing the drives available on the systems and access to options area.
From the list of partitions you get to navigate to the folder you want the app to scour for duplicate files. Displaying all the main locations like this makes it easy to instruct the application to perform a scan on the entire hard drive; you have to manually select all the drives since NoDupe does not show the HDDs hooked to the system.
Setting up the search parameters is not a complicated thing. Everything is easy to understand and you don’t have to be a computer expert to define the variables of the search in order to make it more specific.
NoDupe can look for a particular type of files, which comes in handy if you want to search massive photo collections or MP3 files. Restricting the area to a certain file format impacts the search process, shortening its duration only, accuracy remaining unaffected.
Another set of options designed to make the search for double content more specific is defining a minimum and maximum size for the data. This way the app will compare only items with the size according to the set parameters.
This is all that’s available as far as making the procedure more specific. Some users may deem this as a scanty list of settings, which lack the possibility to look them up by date, but NoDupe has been created to carry out a more general examination, and this is exactly what it does.
The application can mark the duplicates to be deleted in your stead. The option is not completely automatic, though, as you still have to decide whether you want them selected according to the date of their creation or their size.
As far as deletion is concerned, NoDupe can be set to delete the items permanently without sending them to Recycle Bin; or it can send them there, in which case the user can customize the app to issue warnings when it erases more than a certain number of items or when their size combined is more than a preset threshold. Additionally, you do not have to worry about empty folders, as the program can eliminate them as well.
Although it is an early version, the app sports a very handy option: integration with Windows Explorer. This is a useful setting since you can start the search for duplicates from the context menu of a folder, thus saving time starting the program yourself and browsing for the desired location.
The search for duplicates is quite fast from what we’ve seen thus far, NoDupe going through the gigabytes like knife through butter. It took a little under 4 minutes to go through 168GB of data and uncover more than 900 duplicate files.
In order to keep accuracy up at 100% NoDupe checks every bit of a file and compares the data according to size, the two traits that remain unchanged in the case of duplicate files.
System resource usage required while looking for double content are not to be ignored especially if you’re running the app on a less powerful station. During our tests CPU usage peaked at 90%, but the average recorded settled around 40%, on a Dual Core 2GHz AMD processor.
One of the weak spots of the application is the results page. The entries are segregated only by a group number, which makes distinguishing between them a tad difficult. Also, it would be nice to have the possibility to open the folder containing a selected file straight from this screen.
The application integrates in Windows Explorer allowing you to start a search for duplicate content on any directory you want, from its context menu. You cannot open the folder containing an item you select in the results list. Also, choosing a different, more evident, style to group the duplicates uncovered would be a much needed improvement.
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