Is it worth the money?
Duplicate Cleaner Pro 4.0
Duplicate Cleaner Pro 4.0 Format: Windows Website: www.duplicatecleaner.com Price: £19.95 Free trial period: 15 days
Two years ago I decided to upgrade my computer’s hard drive. Out went my old, creaking 500GB drive and in its place came a shiny 2TB one. So, what did I do next? Filled it up with files from my old hard drive, and photos from my phone and tablet of course.
I could – and should – have taken the time then to remove duplicate files to make sure my new hard drive stayed as clutter-free as possible… but, of course, I didn’t. Two years later and my 2TB drive is more disorganised than my 500GB one ever was. There is one silver lining – my PC is now the perfect testing ground to find out if Duplicate Cleaner Pro 4 can turn the tide.
So, what does it do?
Duplicate Cleaner Pro delves into the nooks and crannies of your PC to hunt down duplicate photos, albums, videos, documents and files that you’d forgotten all about. An initial scan of my PC uncovered a folder, which contained tracks I’d intended to burn to a CD. The songs it contained resided elsewhere on my hard drive, and all they were doing now was taking up valuable space.
Further scans for photos also found duplicates. Deleting these wasn’t as straightforward as blitzing my music because the files were scattered willy nilly across my drive. This is no problem for Duplicate Cleaner, which creates a list of all the duplicates its finds, from which you delete the ones you no longer need. The program’s ‘Selection assistant’ helps you out by deleting all but the highest-quality version of a photo or a track – see screenshot top-right).
Digging even deeper
With the easy-to-find duplicates removed, I turned to Duplicate Cleaner’s more sophisticated features. For example, its ability to scan for files that are similar (rather than identical), so you can locate duplicates of songs or music tracks, where one has been cropped or edited.
To do this, click either the ‘Image mode’ or ‘Audio mode’ tabs, then specify the percentage of difference between duplicates you can live with (100 per cent is identical). Do this when you have time to spare – a difference of 90 per cent took just over an hour to scan, though you can speed things up by scanning only certain folders. When it comes to photos, you can preview duplicates of the same image by selecting the group in your results list,
then clicking ‘Image preview’. This opens all the suggested duplicates of a particular file side-by-side (see screenshot left) so you can decide which you want to keep.
The ‘File removal’ tool gave me further peace of mind by letting me copy the marked files to another folder, rather than deleting them outright. You can never be too careful!