Not sure if this is the right forum, but I am looking for a good program to search all of my many hard drives for duplicate photos and music and such so I can get rid of them. I have done searches to fond one, but most of the results are from 2004-2005.
thanks!
Have a look at this one,
Find duplicate files with Auslogics Duplicate File Finder
It's free but make sure you uncheck the toolbar offer when installing.
I use this free one--works fine on Windows 7:
DupDetector
I will check these both out. Thanks for the suggestions.
Beside advices from other members, you can visit the following site and pick your program for free too:
Best Free Duplicate File Detector
You might consider using a file sychronizer instead of a dupe finder.
It would require you to do some manual file organizing first, but once you do that
you'll never need a dupe finder anyway.
Part of a sync tool's function is finding dupes.
That might be why you're only finding older dupe finder programs - they've been overtaken by sycn tools. Just guessing. I quit looking at dupe finders years ago when I began using sync tools.
Could be safer to use and do more for you in organizing your data.
Since you have plenty of disks, a backup or 2 of the files you know you want to keep would get done at the same time.
MS SyncToy works pretty well. Whatever you use, be careful you know how it works so you don't delete something you want.
How does it happen that the same picture has 2 names in the same folder?
Or any other folder for that matter. Because it's a different file.
Has a different timestamp too, which syncing tools look at.
As soon as a file is renamed it is a different file. Name has always been part of the file definition to me, and I suspect most people.
If somebody else wants to use a different definition, fine with me.
If I do something with x.jpg in photoshop and save it as y.jpg it's because I had a purpose for the new file name. Even if I made no changes, I did that myself for some purpose. Hopefully named it according to that purpose, and not "y."
That kind of situation is a manual process, and IMO should be fixed manually.
Sure, you can do byte by byte compares of 2 files regardless of name.
Kludgey process, requiring for example that every file sized 2048 bytes be compared to every other file sized 2048 bytes, regardless of name or timestamp.
Doubt you'll ever find 2 different named files with the same byte by byte contents unless you did it yourself with some purpose in mind. You can even put your timestamp on files. In the past as least.
Anyway, I don't care what anybody uses to take care of duplicate files.
Just suggested an alternative.
Because I downloaded the same pic of the same 1957 Chevrolet twice, maybe 3 years apart, and put them in my 1957 Chevrolet folder?
I downloaded the second pic without realizing I already had it. They are likely different sizes and have different names.
Maybe one is of higher quality than the other, in which case I would want to keep the better pic.
I'd love a sync program that can reveal all of that to me.
