Which duplicate files and folders finders exist for Windows?

Question

I need a free duplicate file finder/remover app, with ability to find duplicate files/folders by name and/or by size and to remove one of duplicates.

Answer 1

I have tried literally dozens of duplicate file finders (I still have the installers/ZIP files for about 20 of them sitting around). I used CloneMaster 2.19 for a time because it was the best one I could find, though even that wans’t perfect (I wanted one that could also detect duplicate MP3s by audio content, ignoring the tags). All of them had problems that frustrated me enough that I decided to write my own and laid out a list of the features I demand of a DFF.

And then I found AllDup. It is the first and only one that actually made me abandon a project (technically mine isn’t completely abandoned, it’s just no longer being worked on since I don’t need to write it anymore because AllDup does everything I want of it). Anyway, AllDup searches for duplicate files, but unlike the others, it uses a lot of the tricks and techniques that I was going to use in my own DFF. As such, it is very fast: it can for example scan >250,000 of sizes from 1B-5GB in ~30mins (I have done it on my system several times).

Another great (and for some reason rare) feature of AllDup is as I mentioned that it can scan for duplicate MP3s by their actually audio data while ignoring tags, so two MP3s that are the same but have differing tags (very common when downloading) will be detected as duplicates. (It could even detect when I ripped two identical songs from two different CDs—with different tags of course.) Of course it can detect dupes based on other factors besides byte-for-byte content, like filenames, dates, etc.

Other great features of AllDup include the ability to filter (include or exclude) based on filename and/or folder name and/or filesize. The results screen is also very versatile with options to select files based on date, path, name, this, that, the other… It also has variety in what to do with detected duplicates

Michael Thummerer is also very receptive. I have reported bugs and suggested features to him several times which he addressed extremely quickly (to the point that he told me to download and try out a beta with the updates in the very next emails the same day).

Oh and it’s free.

HTH

Answer 2

Duplicate Cleaner is very fast and it has extensive result set filtering possibilities.

Answer 3

There was this Duplicate File Finder available for some time but now its only on secondary sites, like this Softpedia reference.

The Wareseeker site shows the correct reference http://dff.nazrashid.com/ which is no longer around. I would be careful fetching executables from such sites though.

It can do search for duplicates within multiple directory trees based on,

• contents (i think it does a md5 match)
• size
• name
• name and size
• contents and name

And, it lets you filter your search by a minimum and maximum files size (speeds up things when you know the bounds).

A very thoughtful piece of software. Don't know if there is something as fast and featured for free around these days.

---

The comments refer to a similar Sourceforge tool called Doubles

Answer 4

Clonespy http://www.clonespy.com

I find this very helpful and more useful than doublekiller. A particularly nice feature is the "Pools" feature, where you can compare one group of directories with another group of directories while ignoring duplicates within the groups.

For example, my partner likes to keep duplicate image files while working with images. I want to see if I have any copies of those files in my directories.

Pool 1 - Partner Home Directory Pool 2 - My Home Directory.

The only duplicates found are if a file is present both in my directories and my partner's directories. The files only duplicated in my partner's directories are ignored.

Answer 5

I have the following batch file lying around for some time:

@ECHO OFF
REM TODO: Help when run with /? and switch for recursion
REM Furthermore check whether we might have enough files to hit the envvar length limit
REM and switch strategies accordingly (slower but finds all dupes then)
SETLOCAL ENABLEEXTENSIONS ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION
REM This method speeds up comparison but suffers from long file lists
REM as environment variables have a length limit
SET FILELIST=
FOR %1 %%i IN (*) DO (
    FOR %%j IN (!FILELIST!) DO (
        IF %%~zi EQU %%~zj (
            fc /b "%%~i" "%%~j">NUL && echo "%%~i" = "%%~j"
        )
    )
    SET FILELIST=!FILELIST! "%%~i"
)
ENDLOCAL
GOTO :EOF

You can run it with /r as argument to run recursively through the directory tree.

Answer 6

Total Commander has a brilliant duplicate file finder utility. Unfortunately it is not free.

As nik mentioned there is the Duplicate File Finder which is open source and cross platform. It's available on SourceForge here

Answer 7

DoubleKiller is an excellent free (they also have a pro version) duplicate file finder/remover. I've been using it for years and would thoroughly recommend it.

http://www.bigbangenterprises.de/en/doublekiller

Answer 8

Winmerge http://winmerge.org/

Compare very similar directories, perhaps between your "Documents" folder and your impromptu "backup", "Copy of Documents" folder, you created several weeks ago "just in case".

You can figure out what files are still identical, which files are the newest (or oldest, if you have encountered a problem), and which files exist only in one place. Then you can "merge" the directories and delete the duplicates.

Answer 9

Advanced system care free comes with an Clone Files Finder with the program. I use it, and it works fine.

Answer 10

Duplocator. A cross-platform duplicate-finding python script.

Answer 11

I have found Yet Another Duplicate File Remover to be awesome. It is pretty new and very easy to use. I used it to compare over 50,000 files from a hard drive recovery project, so it can handle a large amount of files.

Answer 12

The best solution I tested on windows was the already mentioned Alldup. Props to Synetech inc. for sharing it. Brilliant and very professional freeware tool.

In the post I provide tested bash solutions that will work under Cygwin, Linux and OS X (or anything that uses bash-like shell).

Looking for duplicate files using freeware and open source tools

Answer 13

Another utility:

http://yurichev.com/ddff.html

* Comparison to other duplicate finding utilities:

+ Very fast
+ Comparing directories too.
+ Often, two directories contain, let's say, 4 equal files and 5th file is different.
  We handle it too and output these as "common files in directories"
+ Absence of unnecessary switches.

- Win32 only
- Command-line only

Answer 14

I've always used an old program Find Duplicates, but now that Geocities has been killed off, I guess it doesn't exist anymore, so here's a copy of the file.

It displays the files in easy-to-see groups isolated by color. It warns you if you've marked all the copies of a file for deletion, can automark them, can selectively automark all files in a directory (I used this a lot), can delete directories that become empty after the deletions, etc. Be careful of links if you're using it in Wine. It will delete all copies of a file without knowing that they are links.

Answer 15

Fast Duplicate File Finder:

• Completely Free
• Can identify duplicates regardless of where they are in the directory/folder structure
• Easy to use Windows UI
• Can produce reports in XML form
• Can Move the duplicates to the recycle bin or another root folder retaining the original folder structure, e.g. if a duplicate file was within a folder within another folder, this path would be retained: the file would still exist within the folder within the folder, and this who structure would be moved to the folder that the user chooses - whether that be the recycling bin or a user-specified folder
• Fast binary comparison algorith as well as checking filename and size.

http://www.mindgems.com/products/Fast-Duplicate-File-Finder/Fast-Duplicate-File-Finder-About.htm