Are you running out of disk space? Find duplicate files from your system and delete them which could save you a lot of space. We always tend to download files unknowingly more than once and leave them around our system without cleaning them up which could result in lot of duplicate files. Manually identifying them is like looking for a needle in a haystack so that’s why we have tools. So let us quickly see how to find duplicate files in your system.
Duplicate Files Finder
Duplicate Files Finder has both GUI and command line options. There may be a lot of utilities that could help you to find duplicate files but this one is pretty fast.
Prerequisites
Installer Size: 1.45 MB
Installation Space Required: 8.9 MB
Supported Operating System: Windows and Linux
License: GPL
Let Us Find Duplicate Files Now
- Download and install the software.
- Launch Duplicate Files Finder from the Start Menu.
- Under Directory name and search parameters section, click the button beside the Directory text box.
- Select the folder which you would like to check for duplicate files. I usually save some learning materials in a folder and it looks like currently the size of the folder is 12.7 GB and has over 47,562 Files under 11,718 Folders. So I have selected this folder for our testing process.
- Click Add button and you should see the directory listed under the directories section.
- Now click on the Go button.
- First you will see that the tool will index the files in the directory that you have specified using its own algorithm – the files are sorted by size and then only compared with each other which is logically perfect, only similar files are compared hence gives you the results faster.
- As you can see from the below screenshot, the Duplicate Files Finder has found 11364 duplicate files which can free 791 MB if removed.
Key Features
- Once you get the results displayed in the Duplicate Files Finder click on the Store button to export the file names to a text file.
- You can specify the type of files that needs to be excluded when the tool searches for duplicate files. Ex: *.lnk and also specify the minimal and maximal file size as the search criteria.
- You can also use the command line version to find duplicate files on your system, just type dupf on the command line, for searching in the paths path1 and path2 and … for duplicates.
Hi Sri,
That was an informative tutorial post
Yes, this is a nice way to find duplicate files, though if you are careful, I don’t think you’d add duplicate ones, isn’t it? Or are they added on their own – I wonder!
Thanks for sharing it with us. Have a nice week ahead
Hello Harleena, Yes, you are absolutely right; if we are careful we won’t download the same file twice or make a copy of the same file and place it in another location (we call this a backup). But most the time this doesn’t happen or at least for lazy heads like me, I never bother to check if I already have that eBook with me, because I simple don’t remember the book name/ it may be saved in a different name, so I always quickly download the eBook again for faster access. As I showed in the screenshot I can free 790 MB if I remove those duplicate files, so for us it is definitely a boon :-).Glad to see you around, have a wonderful day.