Find Duplicate Files & Save Disk Space With dupeGuru [Cross Platform]

Find Duplicate Files & Save Disk Space With dupeGuru [Cross Platform]:

Quickly find duplicate files on your hard drive, so you can delete them and save precious storage space. You’ll be surprised how much of your storage is used to house the same files twice. There are many ways you can end up having duplicate files. Perhaps you copied a file instead of moving it, and failed to notice. Maybe you downloaded the same file twice without realizing it. Whatever the cause, dupeGuru can help you find duplicates so you can delete them.

A free, cross-platform tool, dupeGuru does only one thing – find duplicate files on your computer. As it turns out, it does this one thing very well. Capable of quickly scanning large volumes of files very quickly, dupeGuru scanned half a terabyte of files in a few minutes for me. If you’re running out of hard drive space CCleaner and CCEnhancer can help you free up space in Windows, and BleachBit cleans up Linux systems. If programs like that leave your drive too full however, finding and deleting duplicate files is a good idea.

Find & Remove Duplicates

Getting started with dupeGuru is simple – you need to add folders to scan.

Which folders you add is up to you – you can add just your Documents or the entirety of your hard drive. Be aware though that if it scans your system drive, it may alert you to duplicate files the system needs in order to run. Don’t delete anything you don’t understand.

The scan might take a while, but not too long – I scanned 500GB worth of data in just a few minutes. Once the scan is done you’ll have your results:

As you can see the system points out which files are duplicated and where. By default files are considered duplicates if their contents seem largely the same. As pictured you can see how alike files are by percentage. You can right-click copies to check them out or even delete them.

Would you prefer to find files with the exact same filename? This is possible too:

In the settings you change what a duplicate is. You can scan by the contents of the file, or just look for files with similar names.

Special Versions

Scanning by content or by file name might not give you the results you’re looking for. Music files, for example, can be encoded in different ways. An mp3 file may hold the same song as an mp4 file, for example, but look very different to the default version of dupeGuru.

Don’t panic! There is a special version of dupeGuru just for music files – dupeGuru ME. This version scans the metadata of your music files to find out when you have two copies of the same song.

This helped me find duplicate files I didn’t know about, and can probably help you too.

Are you a photographer? There is another similar tool for pictures. Find redundant copies of photos which are wasting space.

Download & Donate

Like what you see? Head over to the dupeGuru homepage to download dupeGuru. The music and the picture versions can be found there too.

If you use the program, and like it, you should seriously consider donating to the developer. He puts a lot of volunteer time into projects like this, and likes to eat food.

Conclusion

This isn’t the first time we’ve taught you how to find duplicate files. We’ve taught you 5 ways to find duplicate image files in Windows and showed you Auslogics’ duplicate file finder. I like dupeGuru however, because it works on Linux, Mac and Windows computers and is easy to use.

Do you like another tool better? Do you have any questions about dupeGuru? Let us know in the comments below.