Auslogics Duplicate File Finder – find and remove duplicate files
Auslogics Duplicate File Finder is a free program to find and remove duplicate files from your computer. Using the Duplicate File Finder program, the user can find duplicate files that are on the computer’s disks, and, if necessary, delete the found duplicate files from his computer.
When working on a computer, a large number of identical files – duplicates – accumulate on disks. Moreover, such duplicated files can take up a lot of space without bringing any benefit.
Finding duplicates is a very difficult task, so you need to use specialized programs for this. The Duplicate File Finder program will help you find unnecessary duplicate files, and then delete found files from your computer that take up a significant amount of disk space.
Duplicate File Finder to Find Duplicate Files on PC
The free Duplicate File Finder program is produced by a well-known software manufacturer – the Australian company Auslogics Software. You can download the program from the official website of the manufacturer.
The program runs on the Windows operating system and has a Russian (previously only English) interface language.
After downloading the executable file, run the installation of the Duplicate File Finder program on your computer. After the installation of the program is completed, the main window of the Auslogics Duplicate File Finder program will open.
In the main window, in the right column, hard and external drives connected to the computer are displayed. You can mark only those disks on which you will need to search for duplicates.
In the central part of the window, you can select the types of files that the program will search for on your computer.
You can choose from two search options:
- “Search among all files” – the search will be carried out among files of all types.
- “Search only these types of files” – the search will be carried out only among certain types of files.
The default setting is “Search only these file types”. The program will search for images, audio files, video files, archives, applications, because these types of files are most often duplicated on disks.
Uncheck some file types to find duplicate files of only a certain type.
Selecting “Search all files” will search all file types. I do not recommend doing this, because, in this case, you can mistakenly delete the necessary files that are used to run the system.
Duplicate File Finder searches for duplicate files by checking the checksum (hash) of the file, the file name, the date the file was created or modified.
Setting up a search for duplicates
Before you start searching for duplicates, you need to go through five steps to set up search criteria for files.
In the first step, in the main window of the Auslogics Duplicate File Finder program, click on the “Next” button.
In the second step, by default, files smaller than 1 MB will be ignored. Here you can also select settings to ignore large files. If necessary, you can choose your own values for the file size by changing the default ones created in the program.
After selecting the settings, click on the “Next” button.
In the third step, you can configure the file search options by ignoring the file name and file creation date. By default, the program has an option to ignore the creation date of the file. You can choose to ignore all items, Auslogics Duplicate File Finder will perform a wider scan of the selected drive.
To search for a specific file, enter its name. By default, the application searches for all filenames.
In the fifth step, you must choose what to do with the found duplicates.
Auslogics Duplicate File Finder offers a choice of three removal options:
- “Add to cart”.
- “To the Rescue Center” (to the Recovery Center).
- “Irretrievably.”
By default, in the Duplicate File Finder program, the removal of found duplicates to the Recycle Bin is selected. In this case, until the moment when you empty the Recycle Bin, you will be able to restore those files that, in your opinion, were deleted by mistake.
If the Recovery Center is selected, an archive will be created from duplicate files. If necessary, you can restore duplicates from the saved archive.
In case of permanent deletion, the found files will be deleted from the computer without the possibility of their recovery.
Finding Duplicate Files with Duplicate File Finder
After you have completed selecting the search criteria for duplicate files, select the disk or disks on which you want to search for identical files. Then click on the “Search” button to launch a full scan of the selected disk.
Scanning in the Duplicate File Finder program takes place in three stages: first, the number of folders is determined, then the folders that contain the file types selected in the search settings are found, the name and creation date of the files are checked. At the third stage, a full check of the disk is performed.
After the search is completed, a window will open in which the result of the program will be displayed. On my computer, on the “D” drive, the program found 244 duplicates, which take up 3.63 GB of disk space.
The program window shows the name of the file, its location on the disk, the size of the file, and the date of the last modification.
You can manually select files to delete by checking the files you want to delete. To do this, check the boxes next to the selected files, and then click on the “Delete selected files” button.
Duplicate files will be removed, depending on the settings you selected earlier. You can find out exactly how the files will be deleted if you click on the triangle, which is located next to the “Delete selected files” button.
To facilitate the selection of files for deletion, you can use a special menu. To do this, you will need to click on the triangle next to the “Select” button.
In the menu, you can choose several options for action:
- “Invert selection”.
- “Remove selection”.
- “Select duplicates by date modified.”
- “Choose one in each group.”
- “Select all duplicates from these *.pdf files.”
- “Select all duplicates in each group.”
After selecting the desired item, check your choice in the program window in order not to remove anything superfluous from the computer. Then click on the “Delete selected files” button to remove duplicate files.
After the removal of identical files is completed, you can look at the result of your actions.
Recovering deleted files
If you saved an archive with deleted files in the “Recovery Center”, then you can recover deleted files. In the program window, on the top panel, click on the “Rescue Center” button (“Recovery Center”).
After that, the “Auslogics Rescue Center” window will open, in which you can select the saved archive to restore it. Select the archive, and then click on the “Restore” button.
After that, the deleted duplicate files will be restored.
Article Conclusions
Auslogics Duplicate File Finder is a free program designed to find duplicate files. After detecting unnecessary files, it will be possible to delete duplicate files from the computer to free up disk space.