How to find and delete duplicate files

Sooner or later every computer user encounters the same problem – lack of free disk space. The hard drive becomes virtually unusable because there are too many files and folders. Even defragmenting doesn’t work because there is not enough free space left.

Usually that’s when some people turn to drastic measures. They start deleting large folders, uninstalling programs, and then regret it because they lose important files and useful software. Others are more careful and move large files, like videos and songs, to an external hard drive or a thumb drive.

However, there is a better, hassle-free way to not only free up disk space, but also organize files and folders. All you need to do is delete duplicate files. Unnecessary duplicates can occupy a lot of hard drive space that could be put to better use.

If you use your computer every day, create a lot of Microsoft Office documents, download songs, and have lots of holiday photos, then you are bound to have duplicate files scattered all over your hard drive. Usually this happens when you download a song twice or copy-paste a photo to a different folder instead of cut-and-pasting it. Software failures can also be responsible for creating duplicate files.

Duplicate files can become a real nuisance, because they use up disk space and can make browsing folders a bit confusing. But that’s not all – they can also slow down your computer. If there are too many unnecessary copies kept on your hard drive, Windows search becomes slower, your disk defragmenter has to do a lot more work and your anti-virus scans take longer. That’s why deleting duplicate files is so important. You will be able to free up hard drive space and also improve computer performance.

There are a few techniques you can use to find and delete duplicate files. The most obvious one is to go through your folders, find files with identical names and delete them. This works well if you know what exactly you are looking for, but it will fail if you are not quite sure where to look. Another option is to use Windows Search. Unfortunately, these methods have a flaw. Sometimes different files can have identical names and likewise duplicate files can have different names. For example photo.jpg and photo1.jpg can actually be the very same shot, whereas file.doc and file.doc can be two different documents. What to do then?

Fortunately, there is software that can find and delete duplicate files in just a few clicks. Easy Duplicate Finder is a program that will help you manage duplicate files and free up disk space. It will easily find all copies of songs you’ve downloaded twice, documents saved to different locations, and other duplicates. It’s fast, efficient, very easy to use, customizable, and has a byte-by-byte comparison feature, which means that it compares files by content.

Just think about it - you can recover up to 50% of free space by simply deleting duplicate files. Use duplicate finder software once a month and you’ll discover that there is a lot more free disk space than you thought.