Nowadays, we all take our hard drive storage space for granted. It’s only been a couple years where 100+ GB hard drives had became common place. Anyone working with computers for 10 or more years can likely relate to the constant monitoring of the amount of free space left on the hard drive. Today, if by chance I am able to fill up my hard drive, I’m more likely to just buy a larger hard drive. Rinse. Repeat. Previously, when hard drives cost hundreds of dollars, this was quite a silly attitude to take. Instead, we’d diligently scrubbed our hard drive looking for files to delete in order to reclaim the much needed space. Often times tough decisions had to be made – you just couldn’t keep everything. I’m quite glad that those days are in visible only in the rear view mirror. Nevertheless, I like to maintain a clean system and that is why I’m constantly looking for inefficiencies.

Duplicate File Finder is a useful utility to keep your hard drive less cluttered. As the name would imply, Duplicate File Finder will scan a provide folder path on your hard drive and identify sets of duplicate files, or files whose contents are exactly the same. The determination is done by a binary comparison of each file – so you can be quite sure the files it returns are indeed copies. A full scan of roughly 150GB took 15-20minutes and resulted in hundreds of duplicate file sets. Now, I would not recommend to go willy-nilly and delete everything it returns. I look at the utility as a means to provide an insight into potential clutter spots – not as an all encompassing deleting hammer.

A quick search on Google will reveal dozens of applications that do just as Duplicate File Finder does, but I find this tool one of the better ones. The single executable with no installer is really just what I wanted.