Recently, we have seen a relative decline in the amount of storage space. The SSDwhich are still more expensive than hard drives are taken care of to slow down, and not a little, the expansion of data storage volume by default on computers.

But despite the fact that SSDs meant a relative reduction in storage capacity, they ultimately prevailed because they are much faster and, according to some experiences and some studies, more durable. On the other hand, the reality is that hard drives have long been one of the main bottlenecks of computers, so from certain points of view you can even say that SSDs have arrived late.

Although SSDs are still more expensive than hard drives, today their prices are affordable enough to have 1 terabyte of storage in this format. This amount has become the minimum necessary if you don’t want to run out of space and do things that take up a lot of disk space, such as playing games (recent triple-A titles reach tens of gigabytes or even over 100) and professional video editing. If you want to have more than 1 terabyte of storage, if you don’t have a big budget, today many still use hard drives, although they are usually used together with an SSD, which is responsible for storing the operating system and some important files.

With SSD consolidation and software taking up more and more disk space, keeping track of the amount of space used can be important for the average userso using duplicate file detection tools comes in handy to recover wasted space.

Sometimes the file is replicated in different subdirectories because it is a resource that is often reused. Especially if the file is large and you forget to delete copies that are no longer useful, you may find that you have wasted a lot of space. It doesn’t hurt in such situations resort to the tool to detect and remove duplicate files.

Of course, before we start mentioning the tools, four in total in this article, we want to warn you that if the duplicate file is in the system folders or its origin is not clear, it is wise not to perform the elimination. In principle, the border can be set to the root of the user’s personal folder located at the address C:\Users\“Nombre del usuario”. Any file that is at a higher level should not be deleted to preserve system integrity.

Duplicate Cleaner Pro

Duplicate Cleaner Pro It is one of the most famous tools in its segment. Its description already leaves little to the imagination, but it is important to remember that this is a paid application that allows you to delete a maximum of 15 files for a free trial. After that, the user will have to go through the checkout, so it’s a good idea to choose a context on which you want to test the app to see if it convinces you or not.

As we can see, his the interface is quite simple and understandable. It allows you to protect and exclude folders from searches and shows how many times a file is repeated and how much space would be gained by removing its copies. It can also scan Google Drive, Dropbox, SmartScan mobile and delete empty folders, but we recommend limiting the use of the application to files located in the user’s personal folder in the operating system to avoid inconvenience.

Auslogics Duplicate File Finder

Another tool available for removing duplicate files is Auslogics Duplicate File Finder. Compared to the previous one, this piece can be more selective about search settings, because by default it ignores files that share a creation date. If one does not pay attention to this detail, it is possible to see that it will not find duplicates of the file that the user wants to delete.

Auslogics Duplicate File Finder, on the other hand, offers the option to add a trial version of the Auslogics Driver Updater in the installation process, so we basically end up with a typical tool to help the user with system maintenance. However, it is always better to take these types of tools with a grain of salt and if you do use them, use only those parts that are useful and do not pose a safe risk to the integrity of the operating system.

In order to perform a full search of all personal files, the user must uncheck the appropriate boxes to expand the scope, specifically indicating the above creation date.. After configuring the search, the user should see that the tool is working correctly.

Auslogics Duplicate File Finder offers features such as disk cleanup, disk optimization, lost file recovery, the aforementioned driver update, and PC performance enhancement options. When the user clicks on these options, he will be redirected to download the corresponding Auslogics application for which he has to pay, but again we insist that we take these types of tools with great caution and if one is not sure what they are, better use the search. The company’s catalog is even wider, but here we focus on what interests us.

SearchMyFiles

Coming from NirSoft, this tool is a portable app with a bit of an old-fashioned look, but it’s perhaps the most powerful search tool on this list. Of course, the cost of this performance is that it is more complex to use and may require some knowledge of the command line or regular expressions to fully understand.

SearchMyFiles is not focused on finding duplicate files, but any files that are in a directory created by the user. Some criteria are supported, such as creation date, modification and access; attributes, such as whether it is a system file, read-only, or hidden; and allows you to play with a wildcard as a filler for any set of characters. For example, if the user enters *.png in the “Files Wildcard” field, the tool will look for any file whose name ends with “.png”, which should eventually translate into finding all PNG images in the specified directory.

As we said before, we recommend setting the starting point in the user’s root folder to avoid sensitive system files, although this does not mean that you should not be careful when handling personal files, especially if we are talking about a computer that is used for professional or managerial purposes.

After performing the search, the user can see the files with the same name so that he can proceed to remove the duplicates that he is not interested in keeping, but first it is better to look at the size and location to ensure that he is removing the right ones.

CCleaner

And we close the list with a tool that is not even recommended: CCleaner. In addition to the controversial and not recommended registry cleaner, it also has a duplicate file finder that needs a bit of tweaking to limit the search to the user’s folder. To find it, you have to follow the path Tools > Duplicate Finder.

Once inside, it’s up to him to undo the tag C:\*.* to avoid finding duplicate system files. Then click the “Add” button and select the user’s personal folder (C:\Users\“Nombre del usuario” o Desktop > “Username”, in our case Guillermo Puertas) as a starting point and you have to make sure you select “Include files and subfolders” in the Options drop-down menu..

After clicking “OK” to complete the search configuration, you need to click the main mouse button on “Search“. The user will be redirected to the results where they can see the duplicate files in their own folder.

conclusion

As we can see, the user has tools at his disposal that directly or indirectly contribute to the elimination of duplicate files that he has in his personal folder. Although the above-mentioned applications are able to find duplicate files even in directories belonging to the system, we again recommend not to proceed with their removal (or search) in order to avoid endangering the operating system.

Thanks to SSDs, computers with 256GB of data storage or less are still very common, so tools that allow you to find duplicate files are something that are still useful, but only if you’re clear about what you’re doing.