In my last post, I explained how I wanted to confirm that I had properly restored all my files from a hard drive crash before freeing up space on my external drive by deleting some of the old backups. I had started that process by using a directory comparison utility, but discovered that looking at each directory one at a time would take too long. When I went back to the file management section of my favorite download site, I discovered a couple of utilities with the word “duplicate” in the title. Bingo. I found a plethora of options using the following search terms:
remove duplicate files
find duplicates
delete duplicates
I needed a utility that would let me match files based on name and size, since the modification dates had been changed after I restored my files. Several utilities also offer to match using a CRC (checksum). I don’t feel that I’ve found the perfect utility yet, but I found two very good ones that I’ll cover here.
Duplicate Cleaner 1.2
The interface for this tool is a little clunky, but the functionality was great. Here is a shot of the main screen:
After pointing the program to the places you want to search for duplicates, you press the Start button and the program switches to a screen full of the results. Here is a shot of the results screen with the Selection Assistant:
The selection assistant is one of the best features of this utility. With the selection assistant, for example, I was able to select only duplicates that came from my external drive where I keep backup files. The one and only problem I had with this utility was that after using it to compare very large sets of files and selecting the duplicates found on my backup drive, the system gave me a warning message (before deleting, thankfully) saying that I had selected all the files in 11 groups of duplicates. One the one hand, this was a very helpful warning because the whole point of my effort was to confirm that I wasn’t about to delete unique files on my backup drive. On the other hand, the utility didn’t tell me which 11 of the 5,000+ sets where the problem. I had to break my effort into smaller sets, and I was still grateful for the warning.
Double Killer 1.6.2
This is the second utility that I liked. You can see from the shot of this setup screen that you can choose search paths and select matching criteria:
This utility allows you to select the first duplicates in a set or the last duplicates in a set, thus, avoiding the problem of selecting every instance of a given copy. Your other selection options are pretty limited, however, so I think this utility is a better choice for someone who has files that are pretty organized to begin with.
