SYSTEM TOOLS
DELETE DUPLICATE FILES DON’T USE Duplicate File Finder www.ashisoft.com
Duplicate files are a pain. Accumulating over the years, they eat up valuable space on your hard drive, often without you ever knowing they exist. Duplicate File Finder offers to identify and remove these space hogs. However, while it does a great job of hunting them down, it will only delete them once you’ve upgraded to the Pro version (for £23).
Developer Ashisoft can argue all it likes that the program’s name promises to only find duplicates, not delete them, but its website deftly avoids making it clear that removal of said file will cost you. And so having spent time scanning and identifying duplicate files, we were hit with the message ‘This feature is not available in the Trial Edition’ (see screenshot above right) when we tried to delete them. It was also the first time ‘trial edition’ had been mentioned.
WE RECOMMEND Alldup www.snipca.com/29314
Its design could do with an overhaul (it looks dated and the banks of large buttons are overwhelming, see screenshot right), but Alldup is powerfully effective. Tell it where to look, and it gets to work. In the results window, the preview pane lets you quickly compare files marked as duplicates before deleting.
The latest version, released in September, adds the ability to scan removable drives (such as external drives and USB sticks), and also lets you sort search results. See our Workshop (Issue 538, page 38) for instructions on how to use it.
RECOVER DELETED FILES DON’T USE Recoverit www.snipca.com/29389
Accidentally deleting important files is annoying. What you don’t need is a recovery tool that promises to find them, but fails to mention that you’ll need to pay. Recoverit’s main limitation is that it restricts you to 100MB (about 20 photos). Dig around on the website and you’ll find a reference to this, but it’s hardly front and centre. In usage, you’ll only find out about the restriction after you’ve run a series of scans (it took us three scans taking around 30 minutes to see any ‘recoverable’ files).
The solution? Pay £30 for the Pro version, which includes unlimited file recovery. It’s a shame, as Recoverit is otherwise well designed and easy to use.
WE RECOMMEND Recuva www.ccleaner.com/recuva
Recuva, by Piriform (the developer behind Ccleaner - see How I Use, page 20), is a great – and entirely free – alternative to Recoverit. You can either tell it where and what file type to look for, or run a scan of your entire PC.
It unearthed 10,850 files (see screenshot below). It did this in less time than it took Recoverit to locate three!