Back in the days of the dial up internet connections (the ones that makes funny noise when you connect the modem), people preferred to search through their hard disks for a file that knew they had downloaded before, because it used to take a long time in downloading files. It used to take more than an hour to download files as small as 100 MB. But now everyone has very fast internet access and if they don’t really try to find a previously downloaded file anymore – instead of checking one or two folders, they open the web browser and choose to re-download the desired file once again.
I do it myself sometimes, but this often results in hundreds of identical files scattered through your storage disks. These files not only take up the disk space that could have been used by something else, but are also responsible of a system slow down. You can easily detect and remove these identical files using a free software called DupeKill. As its name suggests, it is a duplicate file killer (or rather eraser).
DupeKill scans one partition or a folder for duplicate files by matching the file hashes. You can select the path to scan for the duplicate files and also optionally choose to recursively scan a folder. Clicking on the Scan button will instantly search for and enlist all the detected duplicate files. All the identical files are listed in a group and you can keep or delete any number of files. Typically you would want to keep one file from each of the group of identical files and remove the rest.
It uses a number of file hashing algorithms (like MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512) to check if two or more files are identical. The MD5 is obviously the fastest of these all but in rare cases it can fail and detect two files to be identical when they are not. If you want to prevent such MD5 failures, then you can use SHA1 algorithm, and there seems to be no point of including other algorithms they will only make the scanning slower.
In the settings, you can choose the hash algorithm, enable the shell integration (so that you can right-click on a folder and choose to find all duplicate files in it), add a shortcut to Start Menu and more. You can also run a benchmark of which of the hashing algorithms works faster on your system or works under. But as expected, the MD5 hashing wins the race of computing 10 hashes of 2MB of random data.
Conclusion: DupeKill provides you with fast and efficient methods to search for the identical files on your PC and remove them instantly. This little tool can recover a lot of disk space on any Windows computer that has been in use for one year or more.
You can download DupeKill from https://cresstone.com/.