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With hard drives being as cheap as they are, some of you have become lazy and have duplicate files all over your PC wasting up space. Sometimes it’s good to do a little housekeeping on your PC but the thought of taking the time to look for these files can be time consuming. A freeware program called DupKiller can make looking for these duplicate files easy.

Click on the program logo to open up the website for DupKiller

Here’s a list of features directly from the developer’s website:

Simple installation program with un-install option.

Easy to use graphical user interface.

Freeware.

No nag screens or delays of any kind.

No adware/spyware or other “hidden features”.

No limitations on number of files, folders or drives.

Search for duplicate files on local PC and over the network (partially).

Works with all removable media devices such as floppy disk, CD/DVD-ROM, USB devices, etc.

Allows important folders or file types to be excluded from scanning.

Search any folder or drive combinations for duplicate files.

Load and save search results and program settings.

Last search results and settings automatically saved on program exit.

Delete files to Recycle Bin or directly from hard disk.

Open windows explorer in a matched files directory to check the contents of the folder/file.

Image preview for graphic and text files.

Statistics for duplicate files, disk space used by duplicate files and number of duplicate files.

Statistics for amount of hard disk space freed after deleting duplicates.

Automatic deletion with wildcards feature.

Fast search algorithm with various search options:

Match by file content (binary file compare).

Match by file name.

Detect similar names.

Match by file size.

Match by file type.

Match by file date and time.

Skip zero length files.

Minimum and maximum file size searching.

Enable inexact comparison (some per cent matching).

Turn scanning of hidden/system/read-only/archive files and folders on or off.

 

So let’s see the program in action. This current installation of XP in this system is less than a month old so I’m going to purposely make some duplicate files to see what it finds.

 The three duplicate files I have made for testing are:

1) A copy of an mp3 file - O2.mp3

2) A copy of a text file called Dupkiller.txt in the hard drive and one on the USB thumb drive.

3) A file called Duptest.txt but with slightly different text in the file.

When you first start the program, it opens up to the ‘Scan Drives’ page. You’re going to notice is that the system is initially going to only show any hard drives and floppy drives on your system. If you want to look in other locations like a USB drive, you’ll need to place a checkmark beside ‘Show removable drives’. Do the same for any other drives you want to include in the search.

Once you’ve made the necessary drive selections, click ‘Scan’. It should change over to the ‘Statistics’ option and then over to the ‘List’ option showing the results of the scan

It ran a scan of about 6GB of data on two different drives in a matter of 36 seconds (Note that my drive had about 11 GB of data but the Windows and Program Files folder was excluded from the search). It found the two identical files and ignored the third file which was named the same but had different text in the body of the file.

All you have to do is place a checkmark beside the files you selected and click ‘Delete Selected Files’ at the top of the screen to send them on to the ‘Recycle Bin’. You’ll also notice from the top picture that it also has found link (lnk) files and configuration (ini) files. You won’t want to delete them so you can place a check mark beside one of them and click ‘Exclude Type…’ at the top of the screen so that DupKiller excludes them from future scans.

So now that we’ve run a standard scan, let’s take a look at the other options.

In the ‘Files and Folders’ you can specify specific files to look for or specify folders to scan if you don’t want to scan the full drive.

Under ‘Exclusions’, you can specify files to exclude from the scan and also folders. The ‘Program Files’ and ‘Windows’ folder is excluded from the scan by default.

Within ‘Search Settings’, you can set the tolerance level for file searches. This can prove helpful if you revise files or documents and fail to delete older files. Changing these settings will help make it easier to track down such files.

In ‘Other Options’, you’ll be able to set options for DupKiller such as the priority the program should run at.

Finally, under ‘Removal’ you’ll be able to choose how files are deleted. By default, DupKiller removes deleted files to the Recycle Bin but you can change it to delete files permanently as well as other removal options.

Once you’re done deleting all the duplicate files, I’d recommend defragmenting the drive. I’ll introduce a faster freeware alternative to defrag your drives in a separate article. Upon doing so, you will have more hard drive space as well as a faster system after the defragmentation.