Nowadays a terabyte of storage is something common and usually we do not worry about free space. Unfortunately the size of the files has grown too and by downloading, copying, saving multiple versions of files we soon end up with a full disk drive again.
Keeping an organized file system is not always easy in the busy world today. Manual disk cleaning is a heavy task to be carried out too. Fortunately Fast Duplicate File Finder by MindGems Inc. can solve this problem for free.
Follow this easy step-by-step guide with me in order to clean duplicate files.
Once you add the folders to be scanned there are some handy options that you can tweak. In the folders panel you can exclude some folders from the auto-check feature. This is handy if you would like to preserve the files in some "'source"' folder(s). You can also "Disable Self-Scan" for certain folders which means that files inside will not be compared against each other. This is a neat feature if you want to compare folder A against folder B.
Next step is choosing the scan method. There are three scan methods in the application - "100% Equal Files", "Similar File Names" and "Similar Files". The first and second modes are the fastest. I recommend you to use the "100% Equal Files" mode first. In the second and third modes you can specify a similarity percentage that will be used for the comparison.
Once you are done with the above hit the "Star Scan" button to begin the search for duplicates. The time necessary to complete the task depends on the size and speed of your drives.
With growing mp3 music collection we often end-up with duplicate tracks taking-up space on our disk-drives, some of the files we have copied, some of them we have downloaded multiple times and some we have converted from other sources. De-duplicating your music collection and maintaining it in order manually requires hours or even days of work to check all the folders and keep the ones with the best quality, luckily we have automated software to do this task with ease.
One such commercial application is Audio Dedupe which can handle this situation easily and precisely, the software is capable of recognizing duplicate audio files even if they are not marked with ID3tags and are stored in different file formats. This is not just a standard duplicate file finder as Audio Dedupe will actually listen to the music files and recognize if the song is the same as the others stored in different formats. It can check MP3, MP2, MP1, MPA, WAV, OGG, AIFF, AAC, MP4, FLAC, AC3, WavPack (WV), Musepack (MPC) and Windows Media Audio (WMA) file formats and allows you to clean up the duplicates to save valuable drive space.
Once you add the folders to be scanned you can choose the similarity percentage in order to narrow or broaden your search results and start the scan. In the folders panel you can also exclude some folders from the auto-check feature. This is handy if you would like to preserve the files in some "'source"' folder(s).
Nowadays a terabyte of storage is something common and usually we do not worry about free space. Unfortunately the size of the files has grown too and by downloading, copying, saving multiple versions of files we soon end up with a full disk drive again.
With growing mp3 music collection we often end-up with duplicate tracks taking-up space on our disk-drives, some of the files we have copied, some of them we have downloaded multiple times and some we have converted from other sources. De-duplicating your music collection and maintaining it in order manually requires hours or even days of work to check all the folders and keep the ones with the best quality, luckily we have automated software to do this task with ease.
