Duplicate Files Searcher

Working with many resources on your projects, such as documents, or multimedia files, might leave duplicates behind, which after long term usage of the computer can end up taking a lot of disk space. In this regard, Duplicate Files Searcher wants to help you easily locate similar files on your hard disk drive, delete, or move them to a different location.

Before you can enjoy all the application has to offer, you need to check whether or not Java Runtime Environment is installed on your computer, because it’s a mandatory component for functionality. On the other hand, portability allows you to carry it around on a USB flash drive to use on other computers besides your own.

The visual design is pretty intuitive, with different tabs providing quick access to all functions, like directories browser, file database, filters, search options, and results. Sadly, dropping a folder over the main window doesn’t add it to the list, but using the browse dialog is not difficult, and also asks whether you want to include subdirectories.

Search doesn’t start right away, so you have time to set up file filters in case you’re looking to clean up just specific types of files. Three types of filters can be configured, for name, size, and date. Don’t worry about format, because configuring the name filter with wildcards, and extension looks only for those files matching preset descriptions.

Depending on the depth of cleaning you want to perform, search options enable you to check file name, date, length, content, perform byte for byte comparison, skip hidden files, use hashing algorithms like SHA or MD5, and include results in a custom database.

The operation doesn’t take long to look through your selection of folders, but this mostly depends on the size, and complexity of the selected folder. Once done, you can switch to the results tab. These are neatly organized in clearly distinguishable groups, with the possibility to enable image preview. You can select all duplicates except one in order to delete, or move to a different location.

To sum it up, Duplicate Files Searcher is a reliable application which you might want to use every now and then to remove duplicate files you don’t really need, and take up disk space for no reason. Custom filters can be configured to narrow down results, with search finished in little time, and decent set of operations for results.