Over time, we accumulate a lot of personnel files such as photos, videos, documents, and others on our personal computer, which take up a large space on our internal storage disk that may be estimated at tens of gigabytes, and if you, like me, have a storage disk with a small space capacity, surely every megabyte is important, and it is necessary to delete the duplicate files to gain more space. But since the number of these files is very large and may be in different overlapping paths, it is almost impossible to search for, classify, compare, and delete all files manually, and here we must use an application that saves us effort and time during this process.
In fact, there are a lot of applications that do this task, but most of them are paid, and certainly, not everyone can buy applications, so in this article, I will tell you about a free and open-source program that searches and deletes duplicate files easily.
Warning: Use this application at your own risk and review the search results before choosing to delete any file. Neither Baytecka nor its owner shall be liable for the loss or damage to any of your personnel files. Please use this program with extreme caution.
dupeGuru is a cross-platform tool (running on Linux, OS X, and Windows) written in Python that helps find, identify and clear duplicate files on your computer. It has three modes, Standard, Music, and Picture, with each mode having its own scan types, features, and its own preferences' panel's options:
- Standard is for any type of files, although it lacks specialized features other modes have.
- Music mode scans only music files, but it supports tags comparison, and its results window has many audio-related informational columns.
- Picture mode scans only pictures, but its contents scan type is a powerful matcher that can find similar pictures without being the same.
To search for duplicate files, download the program (download link at the bottom of this article), install it on your computer, and then launch it.
Choose one of the three search modes above and add directories that you suspect contain duplicate files. You can add folders here, or even entire storage drives, but remember that the more directories you add, the more time it takes.
In addition to the search modes, you can also define the search type, and you can select between searching for duplicate files with the same name, content, or folders containing the same files.
There is also a button next to the search type menu that enables you to control and adjust the search settings such as Ignore files that are less than a certain value (10 KB or 1 MB for example), remove empty folders after deletion, or move, ignore duplicates associated with the same file...
You can also stay with the default settings and ignore this options window.
When you are done with the customization process, start the search and wait for it to finish, and the results page will appear.
This page contains all the duplicate files found in the directories you selected at the beginning of the search. On top of each group of these files, there is a file colored in gray and its name written in blue, and neither can be selected nor deleted. The program calls this copy the reference file, and it is a copy of these duplicate files that the program identifies as the original copy of a file.
With this procedure dupeGuru ensures that you keep a single copy of any similar files you delete, you will not lose all copies of duplicate files, you will always keep a copy in a specific path in one of the chosen directories.
In case you want to set a reference file other than the one suggested by the app, just right-click on it, and select "Make selected into Reference".
At the top of the window are two checkboxes:
- Dups Only: When this mode is enabled, the duplicates are shown without their reference file. You can select, highlight, and sort this list, just like in normal mode. This option is useful when you want to remove all files with a specified extension ("EXE" files, for example).
- Delta values: This mode will display the size difference between the reference files and other files it is duplicated from.
1- Look at every duplicate (The files that are indented) and verify that it is indeed a duplicate to the group’s reference file.
2- If a file is a false duplicate, select it and click on Actions –> Remove Selected from results.
3- Once you are sure that there is no false duplicate in your results, click on Edit –> Mark All, and then Actions –> Send Marked to Recycle bin.
This was a simple explanation of how to use this powerful program, which has more customizations, filters, and advanced features that you can view in several languages here.
Download:
You can download dupeGuru either through its official website {getButton} $text={Download} $icon={download} $color={#3d85c6} or through the application page on GitHub {getButton} $text={Download} $icon={download} $color={#3d85c6}.