Clean up duplicate files with Dup Scout

Most people begin the process of freeing up hard drive space by clearing away leftover temporary files. And that’s sensible enough: tools like CCleaner make the process quick and easy, and can recover a surprising amount of real estate. This is just the start, though. If you’ve not checked your system recently then it might also be worth scanning it  for duplicate files, which may also be wasting a great deal of space. And Dup Scout makes this very easy indeed.

You get started just by choosing the folders you’d like to scan (which Dup Scout calls “Input Directories”). If you just want to scan your system drive, say, you might choose C:\ , and the program would check the files in this folder and all of its subfolders. Clicking Duplicates > Search then kicks the scanning process off, and you can simply sit back and watch as the list of duplicates appears.

And this may be where you notice Dup Scout’s first big advantage: its speed. Carrying out byte-by-byte comparisons on thousands of files is never going to be quick, but in our initial tests the program was noticeably faster than most of the competition. Other tools typically take around 45 minutes to scan the 2TB of data on our NAS, for instance (that’s over a Gigabit connection), but Dup Scout had finished in 33 minutes, around a 26 percent saving.

The final report then highlights all your duplicate files, with those wasting the most space at the top of the list. But there are many other options available: you can sort the list by file type, say, viewing only duplicate music or movie files; by file size, extension, access, modification or creation time, and more

And best of all, there are a whole host of options available for processing the duplicates. So you can delete some, replace others with links, compress them, move them all to a folder somewhere, and so on.

There are, of course, risks involved with using this kind of tool. Sometimes duplicate executable files (DLLs and so on) are necessary for Windows and your applications to run properly, and if you delete some of these then you can cripple your PC. Dup Scout tries to reduce the risk of harm by excluding your \Windows and \Program Files folders from its scans, but you may still have some critical executables stored elsewhere.

You shouldn’t try to delete all the duplicates, then -- that’s way too dangerous. Better to simply focus on the few which are consuming the most amount of space, especially file types which you know aren’t vital (videos or MP3 files, say). And if you’re in any doubt about the safety of removing a particular duplicate, just leave it alone: freeing up a few megabytes of data isn’t worth the risk of breaking an application (or your entire system).

Please note, this free version of Dup Scout can scan a maximum of 500,000 files and 2TB of storage space. If you need more, the commercial Pro and Ultimate versions of the program extend these limits considerably, and add a host of other features. Prices start at $10 and you can read more at the DupScout site.

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