Duplicate File Detective

Various files and folders accumulate on your computer, and it's not exactly rare to find duplicates. Storage matters, and it can deplete fairly quickly if you happen to have multiple duplicate files on your drives.

While going through your files to sort them is a valid option, it isn't the most efficient one. What if there was dedicated software to find and delete these duplicate entries? Duplicate File Detector is more than capable for the job: make use of its multiple algorithms to find and delete matching files without a problem.

There isn't much to comment on the installation process of this app: it's quick and easy, and upon booting it up, the program will guide you through the motions.

Before commencing a search, you'll have to pick one of the three file-matching algorithms, and the software does a good job explaining the viability of each. Depending on how thorough you want the scanning to be, you can choose between a checksum or quick search, which account for the name, extension, size, and contents of the files, and if you want more accuracy, there's also the Strong Checksum Search.

The Strong Checksum Search analyzes the files' 256-bit checksum, so if there are any files that are the same, but bear different names, this method will find them.

Duplicate music files can be tricky to track, but there's a special algorithm that analyzes such files by way of their audio tags.

The program provides many ways to find those duplicate files, and upon finishing the search, you'll see all of them in the interface. You can delete them yourself, but you can also archive or move them to a different location. There's also an Auto Prune function that removes duplicate report entries for the deleted files. If you want to inspect the results for later, the Export and Import Results capabilities allow users to save a search result, so they can resume it anytime.

Duplicate File Detective is a handy program to have: it finds duplicate files without fault, and you never know how many of those you have until you run a search.