While we have discussed the annoyance of having duplicate songs in our music libraries, I have come to find that irritation can also occur within our overall file system. While you might not physically see any duplicate files when browsing through your computer, it’s always good to check your drives and by doing so possibly freeing up some space on your hard drives. Doing a Google search for a duplicate file cleaner will leave you with pages of results, so when you are on the hunt for the right one be sure to check that to which extent it can search. You want a file cleaner that can apply filters using regular expressions to help narrow down your search. AllDup offers a quick way of finding and removing duplicate files while supporting multiple types of filters to narrow down the exploration. It was developed to be light on system resources, so you can carry on with your work throughout the scanning process. An option to include or exclude NTFS junction points is also available to include or exclude folders from scanning which are referring to other (linked) folders.
With AllDup, you can identify search criteria according to your systems current status. You can for instance choose to thoroughly scan the system for duplicate files by enabling file content byte-by-byte compare option or check most recently added folders and files only.
The main interface allows you to directly start the scanning process. Before starting the process, choose source folders, set search criteria and options, and apply necessary file and folder filters.
If you want to do the deep scanning method, don’t forget to enable Content (Byte by byte compare) option followed by specify File Content options.
You can also find settings in ‘Search Options’, ‘File Filter’ and ‘Folder Filter’ windows to customize the search process. After you’ve set up the required options, click Start Search to begin the search process. I would like to note that file content based search may take a little longer than normal scanning process. Once the scanning is complete, you will see a list of the groups which contain duplicate files. Apart from options present in toolbar, you can open, move, and delete the groups having duplicates from right-click menu.
Check out the AllDup website to learn more as well as download a free copy of AllDup. It will work on XP, Vista and Windows 7 machines.
