Program to find dupes in windows

i am looking for recommendations on software to find dupes in windows, mostly music and movies but also general dupes eg. docs,dll's etc. the more info the program gives the better. free is the ideal option if possible, but i would consider a paid app if its worth it.

Gazzer

 

see maybe duplicate cleaner free
http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/duplicate-cleaner

 

I'm a fan of this program: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/search_my_files.html

 

I haven't tried the others, but I have used Clonespy in the past: http://www.clonespy.com/

 

One more freebie by Auslogics:

http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/duplicate-file-finder/

You can specify what type of files that you want to search (image, audio, etc).

For a paid app that has more "stuff", NoClone has been out for quite a while and is very good:

http://noclone.net/

 

Just a warning. Dupes sometimes serve a purpose, if you have a 64 bit OS deleting dupes will render your system broken & unable to boot properly.

Remember system32 & system64 folders are almost mirror images.

 

sometimes I use anti-twin
http://www.joerg-rosenthal.com/en/antitwin/download.html
the portable version
and is a good tool working on win8 64bit even if last update is May 2010

 

I absolutely agree with you.I tried a duplicate cleaner and windows explorer would not work.
Never again will i use one of these and i dont see any benefit from them.

 

Yeah things will break normally after deleting dupes. Be warned!

 

It all depends on which duplicate files you delete.

Of course it's unwise to just search for all duplicate files and delete them,however it's useful to delete copies of music or video files for example.

 

It should pointed out its legitimate to have duplicate 32 bit and 64x files on an 64x system. This is expected and normal. And if you delete half of them, you risk breaking the system.

 

Exactly. I never even scan the Windows and apps folders for duplicates.

 

The only files you can safely delete are the ones created by you as the user. Leave the rest alone.

 

It's not that easy, most of these "Dupe Cleaners" search every folder and type of files.

 

All the more reason to avoid so-called "dupe cleaners."

 

Not SearchMyFiles. You tell it what folders to look in and it will scan them. I, for instance, used this program to scan all of the various folders that the users dumped pictures into on the family computer. It worked quite well and caught up to 5 duplicates of the same pictures.... 5!?!?! I have no idea why my family can't just use the folder I labeled "OFFICIAL PICTURE DUMP FOLDER" under "C:\". Is it really that hard?

 

Based on an unpleasant experience trying to rebuild a friend's personal filesystem from a heavily corrupted hard drive, an older hard drive, plus numerous incomplete/overlapping manual backups of what they thought important at the time...

It is sometimes good to begin by inventorying everything including all files that exist in the OS partition and perhaps even that which exists in backups and removables. This should be a read-only type operation that doesn't change anything. It just generates a database of the files and their various attributes, hopefully giving you the option to save that database to its own file so you don't have to go through that step again.

After that you can start performing one or more searches for "dupes" of interest. Sophisticated tools will have various options for doing so. Sometimes you may want to find precisely identical files, sometimes files with the same inner content but different name or other metadata, sometimes even files with the same name which are roughly the same size. Sometimes you only want to find those "dupes" where one of the files exists in a folder or folders you specify. That way it will ignore, say, the same DLL being in multiple program files directories but catch cases where someone inadvertently copied some data files to somewhere they shouldn't have. My friend had gone in and rotated and/or sharpened a large number of pictures but somehow ended up with the desired output files being in an unexpected location. So there were some psuedo-dupes we wanted to find and straighten out.

When it comes to deleting dupes it is really nice to be able to specify rules so that the program knows your master copy locations, and if different, your desired locations. So for example if you have a master folder for pictures and there are dupe files that exist both inside and outside of that folder, the program will delete only those files that exist outside of that folder. Or in the pseudo-dupe case I mentioned, the master copies were in the wrong location so the desired operation was to delete pseudo-dupe files in the right location and then move the wrong location files to the right location.

If you are dealing with a relatively small number of sources/files you can deal with things in a manual fashion. It can become too labor intensive, and mistake prone, to do that in some situations though.

 

It's pretty obvious to me which files I put there and which are system files, as I'm looking for things like videos, photos, and file downloads. CloneSpy allows you to select which folders you want to search, so I can leave out the system folders (actually I omit the entire C: partition).

I should add that it won't just delete files automatically. When it comes across a pair of identical files, it shows them to you so you can select which one you want to delete. You can set it up to automatically mark a file for deletion based on criteria such as the timestamp, filename length, or path length.

 

Exactly.
Caution should be exercised when using such a utility,but that doesn't make them useless.Most offer searches for specific file types to narrow it down.IMO for a reasonably competent user they are a good way to organize your files.

 

The duplicate cleaner from this website does protect windows and important files.
http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/index.php

 

That's one of the ones I use.