14 DAY TRIAL // It has already become old news that large hard disks are no longer the luxury only few can afford and the general public has easier access, money-wise, to storage devices larger than the now tiny 250GB hardware. With all the gigabyte abundance on everyone's computer storing any sort of file almost becomes a reflex. But there comes a time when all that space shrinks and you see yourself compelled to make the most out of the 40 or less gigs you have left as you do not want to delete a single file on it.
Writing all the movies and music to disc is one solution but from my experience this will not last for long and the problem of disk space will again become a stringent issue. Admit it or not, everybody stores duplicate files on the computer, only they are saved in different locations on the hard drive. The trick to gaining more space is to accurately detect the double entries on your computer.
Attempting the manual approach is definitely out of the question as time and effort are too much for such a task. So a good duplicate finder comes into scene sweeping all clones to Recycle Bin. And yet finding a good tool you can trust is quite difficult, but, if you know for sure that the double entries are generally stored under the same name the problem is almost solved.
1-abc.net Duplicate Finder, an easy solution to get rid of the duplicates on your computer, comes at a price of $14.99 and the trial period can be extended to 30 days based on a free regiostration on publisher's website. Besides time trial there is absolutely no other limitation to the evaluation version so you can properly test its accuracy.
Installation is a walk in the park and in our case there were absolutely no problems, neither on Vista, nor on XP. As for the interface, it is as simple as can be. The default language is English, although it also supports French and German (however, "Cancel" button in Options menu remains in German regardless of the language of your choice).
Working with the application will not give you too much headache, either, as all you have to do is choose the location that should be checked for duplicates and set the parameters of the search. Mind that 1-abc.net Duplicate Finder can also look in external drives as well as on CDs, DVDs, USB sticks and camera cards, not only on local drives.
Options menu is in tone with the entire application limiting user's input to checking boxes for the parameters of the search. If you are expecting full power when it comes to detecting duplicates, take a look at the pictures below. 1-abc.net Duplicate Finder is quite limited to the general search options for this kind of software providing a shallow suite of alternatives.
You can look for files with identical names, same size, identical file attributes, exactly the same creation and modification date or with the same date of last access. These are all the options you will benefit from. Unfortunately, this is not enough for finding duplicate files as it seldom happens to save the same song under different file names and surely, it will not often happen to access them in a single day, or even acquire them the same day. Also, many files share the same attributes so there is little relevance in this case, too.
What is missing in this menu is a file comparison function of the contents of the detected files. A file hash would greatly solve the problem and add an infusion of accuracy into the returned results. Testing the application we used two TXT files of the exact same size but with different content, same date of creation and last access and the same attributes. The differences between the two consisted in name and date of modification.
The options used for the test were Identical size, file attributes creation and last access date. We expected 1-abc.net Duplicate Finder to detect them as duplicates and so it happened. Although there were many similarities between the two files, their content was different and the application could not check this.
Results window brings a bit of functionality allowing the user to execute the selected file, open the folder it is stored in or delete it from disk. Of course, the file will be opened with the associated program as 1-abc.net Duplicate Finder brings no additional features in this sense.
All in all, 1-abc.net Duplicate Finder is good if you want to find apparent exact twin or triplet files on your PC but different in content.
The Good
1-abc.net Duplicate Finder is extremely easy to use and will not eat too much of the computer resources. Returned results are grouped according to their size and can be executed from the program with a single click.
The Bad
The list of options available is short and shallow and the software is not capable of checking the content of the files to look for a true exact match.
If not double checked you can end up deleting important files as the application can pick up many false positives during the scan.
Considering its functionality I would say the price is a bit steep.
The Truth
Sure there are similar applications that cost more, but they do a much thorough check of the detected files and you can be sure the results are true duplicates.
During our testing it failed to make finer detection by checking the content of the files, thus returning false positives that may matter in real life. However, you are free to try and test the application for yourselves and then decide upon buying it or not.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
