Duplicate Files

A number of pc utility programs offer the feature of finding and deleting duplicate files. Ashampoo Uninstaller version 5, which I like very much, found over 100,000 duplicate files. The list is daunting, and you have to check each separately in order to delete them. There are a lot of files to go through, but frankly this seems risky. Is deleting duplicate files safe? Obviously there must be some risk involved because the program does not allow you to "choose all" and do a mass delete.

 

no it is not safe. You can use such things on specific folders (e.g. your mp3 collection, etc.) but you should never do that on your full drive (as the operating system keeps duplicate files at different places and the files are needed).

 

Well, I will hold off on using this feature. Seems too risky.

 

Locate the duplicates which take the most space (>50 mb) check what they are, if they are safe to delete (not a system file, maybe a duplicate of a movie you have or a pdf document or some such). Then if you still want to go on filter by extension; pdf, xls, doc, jpg, mov, wmv, avi, mkv, mp3, and similar would be safe to delete. Executables, sys(driver files), .bak (backup format for some applications, and similar) are not safe to delete unless you know what you are doing.

 

I never run Duplicate Cleaner on system partition. I use it only on my data files where there might be some unneeded duplicates. Duplicate Cleaner has a mass select option where you can select what files you want to delete by one click. You can select files by creation date, modification date, path, group... It's really handy and software is also free.