
This will mark all files in a group of duplicates except for one. Now to get rid of the files, you have to click on the little magic wand icon next to Selection Assistant, click on Mark, then Select by group, then select All but one file in each group. When you are done, click the Scan Now button at the top and the results will show in the Duplicate Files or Duplicate Folderssections. Go ahead and navigate to the folder and then click the little arrow button to move that folder to the Search Paths side. Once you choose the search criteria, you then have to add the search locations. Using these criteria, you can perform more complicated searches for duplicates like searching for all files with the same name, but not necessarily the same size and searching for all files with the same content, but not necessarily with the same name. Then you can also choose options like Same File Name, Similar File Names and Same Size. Firstly, you have to choose whether you want to find files with the same content or if you want to ignore the content. Duplicate Cleanerĭuplicate Cleaner Free is a bit better than the NirSoft utility because it has more advanced options for the search criteria. It really depends on what your goal is, but I’ll mention other programs that search differently in case this is not what you’re looking for. It would have been nice if they also showed files with the same name even if they have different sizes.

I also ran into issues with documents that had the same contents and even the same name, but were slightly different in size and therefore didn’t show up in the results. This method of searching is good, but it’s not perfect for photos because there may be times when you have the same photo with two different names or the same photos in different sizes.

When I resized one of the photos, it no longer showed them as duplicates even though it was the same photo, just a different size. If they are the exact same size, the files are considered duplicate. Even though the file names for the photos were different, it seems to find duplicates based only on size.
#Nirsoft searchmyfiles windows 7#
I tried my tests on the sample photos included with Windows 7 and it worked fairly well. Go ahead and click Start Search and you’ll get the results in a pop up window. If you want to restrict the types of files scanned, then you should use the filters. By default, they are configured to search everything. If you’re only looking for duplicate files and want to find all of them, then don’t change any of the filters or settings. As you can see, everything else is self-explanatory. Next, you choose the base folder where you want the search to start from.
#Nirsoft searchmyfiles download#
Once you download and run it (no need to install), just click on the drop down at the very top and change the value to duplicates search.

It also has a search mode called Duplicates Search. It has a ton of filters that let you search by wildcard, by file dates, by file content, by file size, by file attributes, etc. One of their tools is SearchMyFiles, which is basically a super search engine for your local files and folders.
#Nirsoft searchmyfiles software#
If you’re looking for some of the most useful software tools for Windows, then NirSoft should be the first place you look. Once you are certain the correct data was deleted, then you can get rid of the original backup. So always double-check once before you delete anything.Īlso, it goes without saying that you should definitely make a backup of all data before you start this process just in case. It’s worth noting that you should never completely trust the results of a duplicate finder program because there are always scenarios that can confuse the search algorithms and give you false positives. In this article, I’ll mention the ones I used and give a short overview of how the program works, its effectiveness and any issues that I ran into. There was no way I was going to manually try to figure out what was the same and what was a duplicate, so I went ahead and tried out a couple of duplicate finder programs. Looking for some utilities to find duplicate files and photos on your computer quickly and easily? I recently organized all the data that my father had stored on multiple computers and multiple external hard drives into one safe backed up location, but found that there were duplicates of pretty much everything. Save hours of time and gigabytes of space
