Duplicate files exist on our computer for many reasons – downloading same file multiple times, creating a backup copy of some files, saving the same file in different locations and so on. Although not harmful, yet these duplicate files take up the valuable disk space on our hard disk. If you want to get rid of all the duplicate copies of the files, then AllDup is a great tool. It is a freeware application for searching and removing file duplicates on your computer.
The AllDup tool uses fast search algorithms to find duplicates of any file type, whether they are text files, pictures, music or movies. You can download it from the AllDup website. The download is available both as a portable application and as a setup installer. I prefer the portable application because there is no need to install it on your computer. You can extract the contents of the downloaded ZIP archive and run AllDup.exe from there.
You will have to select folders and drives that you want to scan for the duplicate files. Some of the folders are already added by default, but you can add folders of your own choice if you want to in the Source Folders section. There is an option to scan the subfolders for each folder/drive that you add. After this you can go ahead and click on the Start Search button in the toolbar to begin the search.
After the search results are displayed, you can see all the duplicate files in the list grouped together. You can use the toolbar buttons to select the files in these groups in various ways – select all files in a group, select only smallest file in a group, select only first file in a group,select all except the newest file etc. You have to select all files except one from the group. Then you can use the toolbar buttons to remove, copy or move those selected files. Again there are multiple options about how the files are removed.
AllDup also allows you to save the search results into a text or CSV file. AllDup is a small but powerful tool that can help you remove duplicate files from your system with ease. It can help you recover considerable disk space on your hard disk that was taken up by duplicate files. It is portable application so you can keep it on your USB key and use it on any computer you want. So if you want to keep your system unclogged from duplicates, then give AllDup a try.
You can download AllDup from http://www.alldup.de/.