Duplicate files steel a part of our valuable disk space, and they are not always easy to identify and locate. Dup Scout is a powerful free tool that can help you find and manage all those files that sit there unnecessarily, especially the bulkiest ones. Its built-in wizard offers you a long list of filtered search options as well as a wide choice of actions to perform on your duplicate files.
Even though we’re partly responsible for the growing accumulation of duplicate files in our PC’s drives, it is always wise to scan our computers in search of videos, music, photos, or documents that we may have stored in more than one place inadvertently, as well as all those files that programs save again in a new folder every time we install a new version of the app. Dup Scout counts with all the resources required to perform that search in seconds and to show you the results both on the screen and as comprehensive reports and pie charts.
Instead of the kind of wizard that we tend to find in many software tools, Dup Scout’s “wizard” is but a menu with nearly 20 filtered searches that will allow you to find duplicates by type, by creation, modification, and accession dates, owned by a specific user, or with a long file name. By default, results will be shown categorized by disk space, so you can deal with the biggest ones first. Alternatively, and also by default, you can select only those with an extension of your choice, though you can filter the dupes found by a number of other categories. Results can also be displayed as a pie chart, which can then save as an image or as an HTML, PDF, Excel, or text report, to name a few.
You can check every file individually before deciding what to do with them. The program will show you statistics on its size and location, disk space, file system, etc., and even take a closer look at it as an HEX file that supports editing. Once you’re sure about which duplicates to process, you can export them to an SQL database, replace them with hard links or shortcuts, move them to a different directory, compress them, and of course delete them.
The possibilities are nearly endless, and this is just the basic free version of the program. Dup Scout comes also in other flavors, such as Pro, Ultimate, Server, and Enterprise, each version with more functions and features than the previous one. Regardless of the version you select, you’ll find this tool as one of the simplest and most comprehensive ways of detecting and dealing with duplicate files from your local disk, to a network share, a NAS storage device, or an enterprise storage system.
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