One of the benefits of having a broadband internet connection is that you no longer have to look for files on your hard disk. If you want something, you can just download off the internet. For example, if you want to install LibreOffice or Ubuntu or some other software, you can quickly download it in seconds rather than looking for already downloaded copies on your local disks. This usually results in multiple gigabytes of identical files residing on your disks. You can use the freeware tool CloneSpy to detect and remove such duplicate files from your local disks.
CloneSpy can work both as a regular duplicate files finder program and as a program to compare two groups of folders for duplicate files. In the first mode, you specify folders in only the Pool-1 and then scan these folders for duplicate files. For example, you can use this mode to find if you have identical music files in E:\mp3 folder.
In the second mode, you add one or more folders in Pool-1 and some other folder or folders in Pool-2. Now when it detects the duplicate files, you will have options to remove identical files from Pool-1, Pool-2 or from both. This mode makes it very easy to compare two folders and see if duplicate copies of same files exist in them. For example, you can see if same music files exist in E:\mp3 and E:\mp3-new both – and subsequently remove the extra copies from either of these.
In the settings for the CloneSpy, you can choose the criteria of detecting duplicate files, which files and folders should be excluded from the scan, how the identical files should be deleted, how the list of duplicate files should be exported and so on. You can also choose to handle 0-byte files like normal files (all 0-byte files are identical to each other and so you can remove them easily).
Conclusion: If you want to reclaim some extra space on your local disks or removable disks, then you can use the CloneSpy tool. It can be used to make your music collection neat and free of duplicate files.
You can download CloneSpy from http://www.clonespy.com/.