Finding duplicate files on your computer can be very hard. No matter how organize your file system is, you will have duplicate files here and there buried in your system and without the help from a tool you will never be able to duplication-free. Though it’s not the end of the world if you have duplications exist in your system it’s important that it’s duplication-free in your data folder because the last thing you want is the multiple versions of the same file and you don’t know which one is the one you should be keeping.
dupeGuru is a very useful little tool that helps you easily find duplicate files on your computer. It scans either filenames or contents, and features a fuzzy matching algorithm that can find duplicate filenames even when they are not exactly the same.
The installation and the use of the tool are fairly straightforward. Simply add one or more folders into the program, and hit the Scan button.
The scanning process is quite efficient, thanks to its quick fuzzy matching algorithm, which not only finds filenames that are the same but also finds the names that are similar. The results will show up after the scanning process is finished. And then you can pretty much do whatever you want with these duplications, whether deleting them or move/copy them elsewhere. There are also a number of ways to filter and sort the scanning results to easily weed out false positives.
dupeGuru is a multi-platform ready tool. It works perfectly not only on Windows platform, from XP to Windows 7, but also on both Linux and Mac OS X. It’s an open source application but not free. The folks at Hardcoded Software who built the tool calls it fairware, open source software developed with expectation of fair contributions from users. If you don’t buy a license which is $19.95US, you are still able to use the tool to find all the duplications but are limited only able to remove/copy 10 duplicates at once.