How to Find Duplicate Files on Your Computer and Delete Them

How many of you have a lot of duplicate files on computer ? Nearly everyone, correct ? Having duplicate files on your computer can hog up your precious hard disk storage space. It can also adversely affect your computer’s performance and slow down your scheduled backups. Also, you backups will become larger in size.

So, the question arises here is – how do you find duplicate files and delete them ?

One way is to leverage the search option in the operating system and search for the duplicate files using the file name. The search feature is provided in all the operating systems from Windows, Mac and the various flavours of Linux. But searching for duplicate files individually is quite a mammoth task and probably will take a lifetime !

Don’t worry, we at TechCloud are here to help you with simple, yet effective guides.

The best way to find duplicate files and delete them is by using a software called as dupeGuru. This very handy tool can be used to find duplicate files on your computer by scanning for filenames or the file contents. The best feature of this software is that it can find duplicate entries even if the filenames are not exactly the same ! This unique feature is supported by an algorithm called as ‘Fuzzy Match’ that is used by the software.

How to find duplicate files and delete them using dupeGuru ?

The software is very light and easy to use. To find duplicate files you just need to specify a location by selecting the add option and press the ‘Scan’ button.

Once the scan is complete, the software will display the results so that you can remove the duplicate files from your computer. The results also show you the file size and the match percentage which makes it easier to find the duplicate files and remove them permanently. If you are unsure, you can double-click on a particular file from this windows itself to open up the file and confirm before deletion. You can also select multiple files together and action them at once.

The software is open source and does not force you to install any browser plugins or add-ons during the installation process. dupeGuru is available for Windows 7, Windows 8 and 8.1, Max OS X, Arch Linux and Ubuntu.