Easy Duplicate File Finder - Any Good?
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In the October issues of PC World they have listed Easy Duplicate File Finder, as their tool of the month. In essence the tool will find and locate duplicate files that are no longer needed and free up hard disk space. Sounded good to me so I download a copy, which is a freebie.
I ran EDFF and the scan of my system was fairly quick. But what came up was somewhat disturbing. The program indicated that there were 6,000+ dupluicate files using approximately 105+ MB of hard disk space. Interesting. Being the conservative person that I am, I opted not to fix the dups. Instead I fired up Clary Utilities which also has a duplicate finder, ran it, and the program found only 6 duplicate files.
So I ran the program again with the same results. Again, being a big chicken I didn’t do anything with the dups.
What I would like to know is this. Has anyone tried this program? When you deleted the dups, did you experience any problems?
Let us know.
Comments welcome.
4 Comments
Cheryl Allin
September 24th, 2008
at 9:51am
Yeah, I ran it to see what it came up with - then went old school and actually dug into the folders in question to clean up the dupes myself. I did have a bunch of client files nested in main and sub folders, so it worked well for me to clean those up. However, the program will see dupes that might not necessarily be true dupes - like website template folders with different styles or your backup of Joomla where you need those *dupe* files.
In short, the program is nice to kick you off on file cleanup but shouldn’t be trusted 100% to give you the real deal - your own eyeballs will be best at that.
BTW, I’m also playing with another program from PC World - Active Words - which is pretty cool so far as text replacement tool that launches programs and has many interesting features.
Zune80
September 24th, 2008
at 5:15pm
I am also very cautious and leary of duplicate file finding programs. I like to manually make the decision myself. My two cents on the above post is to mention that not all programs are created equal…obviously. A good duplicate finder will at a minium check: file dates, file size, file name (of course), and file checksum. With these four variables you can be 99% certain that you have true duplicates. My suggestion would be to compare the two programs setting for setting on the search variables. If you are using less than the four I mentioned then I would ascertain that your results are seriously skewed, and you should either make the search requirements more strict or find a better program all together.
john
December 24th, 2008
at 5:44am
I am using Duplicate Finder to solve this problem
Duplicate Finder is very fast in searching duplicate files with good interface. it does CRC32, byte/byte and Same FileName comparisons and allows you to batch mark and batch delete or move the dupes.
I really like Duplicate Finder. An especially nice touch was when it told me that I was deleting all copies of a file. I tried a few other duplicate file finders and hated them.
http://www.duplicate-finder.net and see yourself.
Ron Schenone
December 24th, 2008
at 6:34am
Thanks John for sharing your experience with us.