Duplicate File Remover Editor's Review

Duplicate File Remover is a tool which can help you find duplicate files on your hard disk. It provides an easy to use interface, helping you move, copy, or delete any of the duplicate files it finds. Working with this application is very simple. The user interface resembles a wizard, because the process of finding duplicates is organized in stages.

The first thing you need to do is choose what kind of duplicate files you are searching for. You can search through documents, images, music, or video files, but you can also choose to perform an advanced search. If you choose the advanced search method, the program allows you to define the extensions of the files you need to compare. The program searches for duplicate file names and for identical file contents by default. However, if you want the process to be faster, you can select to search for files with identical size, or with the same extended information (ID3 tags, titles, etc.).

Depending on the options you specify, searching the whole hard drive may take a very long time. On my computer (Intel(tm) P4 Processor 3000 MHz, 2 GB RAM, Windws Vista Home Premium, Samsung 200GB ATA133 with 150 GB used space and WD 500 Gb - full), a search through the entire hard drive took about one hour. I was able to work on my computer during the duplicate files search, although the CPU occupancy was at about 50 - 90%.

Pluses: Beside the normal copy, move, or delete operations that you can perform on duplicate files, you can also create hard links on NTFS drives. Hard links are similar to the symbolic links that can be created on EXT3 (Linux) partitions. Hard links allow you to have multiple directory entries for a file, that is, multiple references to the same file, which can be different names in the same folder, or the same or different names in different folders.

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: Duplicate File Remover is one of the best applications for searching and removing duplicate files. This application has a 30 day trial period, which is enough for getting used to it.

version reviewed: 1.5