Find and Delete Duplicate Files on Windows
Wise Duplicate Finder Pro is a duplicate file management tool that can help you find and delete duplicate files by comparing file name, file size or contents. Get rid of annoying duplicates and free up more space on your hard disks.
FEATURES:
* Manage Any Type of Duplicates
* Find Empty Files
* Delete Duplicate Copies Manually or Automatically
* Backup and Restore
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Reviews for Wise Duplicate Finder Pro
Don’t rely on the following if you’re looking for a comprehensive review. This is an evaluation I made for myself, testing the major features that are necessary for me. However, I believe many users have similar needs, and you may be interested.
My data disk drive is split into 2 partitions, D (235 GB written) and E (98 GB written). A significant part of E are files that are redundant with D, which is my main data partition. I have begun cleaning the duplicates, trying different programs in the process. But a large number remain untouched.
I scanned those partitions with Wise Duplicate Finder Pro. Then, I scanned them again with Duplicate Cleaner Free, which is the best free such program I have found up to now. I stopped evaluating Wise Duplicate Cleaner Pro when it became clear that it failed the basic, minimum requirements for my needs.
I set the scan to Exact Match, because this is what you need for maximum reliability. Comparing on file name and/or file size alone might be enough in some cases, but file deduplication is a dangerous operation, and there are many times when it would be foolish to take chances. Exact comparison on content is of course slower. The question is by how much.
That particular scan took me 5 hours on Wise Duplicate Finder Pro — and counting. The progress bar was almost at its end at that stage, but there could have been a long time left. I canceled the process. Fortunately, the program delivered results, albeit after 2 minutes of computing them. More than 5 hours for such a scan is much too long to be usable.
Especially when Duplicate Cleaner Free managed the same scan in 9 minutes and 41 seconds. The huge difference may be partly explained because I set Duplicate Cleaner Free to check files’ content based on MD5 hashes. I don’t know the method used by Wise Duplicate Finder Pro to check on content. But using hashes to that effect is perfectly acceptable.
Even with the supposedly super-safe, alternative setting of byte-by-byte comparison, Duplicate Cleaner Free completed the scan in 36 minutes and 45 seconds. That’s more than 8 times faster. The report displayed 76 433 files and 119 GB scanned, 14 427 groups of duplicates, and 37 347 files having duplicates (totalling 4,53 GB).
Canceling the scan on Wise Duplicate Finder Pro brought up the second critical part of such a program : the screen which allows you to select redundant files in order to delete them. The program shows you the list of all duplicate files, grouped together, and then the aim of the game is to pinpoint correctly all the excess ones, without deleting any necessary files, and especially system files.
This is a delicate task. It needs an array of tools to be done right. Wise Duplicate Finder Pro only offers Keep One and Invert Selection. There’s no way to filter results. You can’t say, for instance, delete all duplicate files on E which have a copy on D. If Keep One does not satisfy your needs and you have more than a few dozen duplicates, it’s impossible to move on from there. Keep One, obviously, does not let you chose which one. Shift and Ctrl keys don’t even work the standard way to ease multiple row selection. You’re left with clicking away on possibly thousands of boxes to complete the task.
Other, lesser annoyances of the program included :
– Primitive interface to select folders to be scanned.
– No information on number of files scanned, Gigabytes scanned, time elapsed, time remaining or percentage of task done.
– The option allowing backup and restore of wrongly deleted files may prove to be an anti-feature. While it does offer theoretical security, if you activate it on tens of Gigabytes of duplicate files, just deleting duplicates may send you in another hour-long copying session, possibly without warning (I did not actually test deletion).
– Imperfect high DPI awareness. Users with high DPI Windows 7 setups may need to tick the relevant box in the executable’s Properties panel to un-blurry the interface, but even then, there remain at least 2 menus with exceedingly small fonts, almost unreadable.
Unless you need to deduplicate a modest number of files, and you are satisfied to compare them on name and size alone, Wise Duplicate Finder Pro is not fit for use, even for free.
It’s even less of an adequate proposition at the regular price, which is 17 € (inclusive of tax, promotional) or 22 € (list price), and then 12 € every year. Asking for a subscription for a dedup program does not hold water.
Especially considering how much more Duplicate Cleaner offers for free. And that’s not even taking into account the Pro version, at a very reasonable one-time price of 26 € (inclusive of tax, promotional).
Read Replies |
Excellent review, super helpful. Cheers :)
Thanks for the review!
What company makes Duplicate Cleaner Free?
I installed and tried the program, and I am going to keep it.
I wanted to dedupe the folder where I download photos and videos from my camera. I opted for the slow exact match type.
I was distrustful at first as any photo/video gone would be irreplaceable. So directly in the results page, with right click, I individually opened and compared about 100 of the about 5.000 duplicates found.
The results were accurate and all pairs or triples were exact copies although the file name could be different (depending on file naming according to the program that I had used to import them, or due to a drive crash in the past ie. recovered photos).
It was a bit disappointing that there was not any option to see large thumbnails in the results, but this is not so bad as such an addition would slow the scanning / results screen down. The details had |date created| and |date modified|. Here it would be better to have a |shooting date| column for example for photos, this was missing and the resizing of the column width was also clumsy.
The program however, did not detect duplicates that had been rotated eg. 90 degrees. But that is ok, better to err on the safe side. With some videos I realised that some files were with different extensions were in the results page, it was not the main video file eg.avi or mpeg4 but .ifo and .bup files; these I carefully unchecked after pressing keep one (the oldest) from the results screen.
So all in all, it is a program that you can trust if you use exact match and if you take the time to check the results. Deleted files will be zipped for every delete operation as a backup to be restored in case of mistake to a folder in the C:\Users\user_name\AppData\Roaming\Wise Duplicate Finder folder, but only to be restored by the program itself when needed and only as a bunch not individual files. When working with photos it is advisable always to have a backup at another location or in the cloud and to sync this every time you download photos, so as not to lose any precious memories. But overall the program works good and is trustworthy, saving hours of checking and valuable space and it works at a reasonable speed. What I like most is the option at the results to automatically select to keep only one of the several duplicate files and delete/check all the rest, and here you can also specify if the version kept will be the newest/oldest etc. this is missing from many other competitor programs and it saves time.
One of the major reason for PC performance degradation is storage devices getting filled up and no space left to run the system in an optimal state. Hard drives can get filled up with junk, and most importantly it gets filled up with duplicates of same files that are spread over at different locations in the drive. These are difficult to track and delete, so it’s almost impossible to get rid of them manually. Nowadays, there are third party applications available to help solve this issue. Most of these available application do not work well, and some even produce false-positive result with a risk of even deleting files which do not have duplicates.
Wise Duplicate Finder Pro is a simple and straightforward software application designed to help you with the issue of storage space shortage due to duplicate files. It let’s you scan, identify, and remove the duplicate files in a matter of few clicks, and even comes with different scanning modes to choose from, depending on the complexity of the situation.
Installation & Set-up
The installer size is ~3MB and the installation process is simple and straightforward, taking no time at all to complete. Once done, you can easily activate the application with your license information, or in this case, the application provided here is already activated, and ready to be used. You can straightaway start using it to scan for duplicate files on your storage drives.
User Interface
The UI of the application is clean, simple, and intuitive. It is designed to be easy-to-use for all kinds of users, even the novices. It’s a single window operation UI, with no confusion at all. At the top, you can add drives, directories, and folders to scan, choose the method of scan, and hit the scan button. The scan result is displayed in the area below, along with details like Name, Folder, Size, Date modified, and Date created. There are 4 types of scan methods to choose from, first one is Match by name and size, then partial match, then exact match, and finally a 0 byte scan to find empty folders. Exact match is the slowest, whereas matching by name and size is the fastest. You can access advanced settings from the bottom. These include setting a minimum and maximum size of files to scan, include/exclude file formats in scan, and exclude a folder from the scan.
Pros
– Clean and simple UI, with one window operation.
– Comes with advanced options for advanced users.
– Delete empty folders and zero size files easily.
– Delete duplicate copies of files Manually or Automatically. The application automatically selects one and deletes the other.
– Backup and Restore feature in case you accidentally delete any files.
– Supports many languages like English, Arabic, Catalan, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesia, Italian, Japanese, and many more.
– Four different scan modes to suit your needs.
– Choose the file types you want to include or exclude from the scan.
– Choose the minimum and maximum file size to include in the scan.
Cons
– Exact match scans take a long time to complete.
– No options to save the scan result to be used in future.
Conclusion
Wise Duplicate Finder Pro is a simple and reliable application, that can help you save a lot of storage space on your PC, and get rid of all the duplicate files. It works well, supports many languages, and even comes with some advanced options for advanced users. The application runs smoothly, without any lag or errors. It is definitely recommended.
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