Find & Delete Duplicate Files on Any Windows PC for Free! 2023

in this video I'll show you how to find and remove duplicate files on your Windows computer removing duplicate files not only frees up unnecessary storage space but it also helps with organization if your computer is cluttered with many of the same files scattered around in different folders it makes it hard to keep things organized and to find the right files when you need them so to find and remove duplicate files we'll be using a program called search my files it handles any and all files such as documents photos and music and the best thing about this is that it's completely free you don't need to pay to upgrade to a Pro Plan to unlock the full functionality and what I also like about this is that this is a portable application which means it can run from a USB flash drive and it doesn't require installation on the host computer's hard drive this means that you can carry around this application on a thumb drive and use it on any Windows computer and if you have a computer issued by your company or your school you don't have to worry about installation restrictions like needing an administrative password however what I don't love about this app is the interface while it's very practical in its utility it does look outdated and because this is a portable app the indexing on the host computer happens as you use the program which can make the search process longer than if the files were pre-indexed the first thing you'll need to do is to download the application you can navigate to this page here I'll put the link in the description below and you'll have to scroll down towards the bottom of the page and there's actually a link here that takes you to the bottom which is convenient and we're concerned with the top two links here so one is to download the application in 32-bit and the second option is to download it in 64-bit now if you don't know which one you need to download just in your windows search bar click on and search for about your PC and then under the system type you'll see whether you need to download 32 or 64-bit for me at 64-bit so I'll close out of this and click on 64. the application is super small so it downloaded really quickly I'm gonna go open the folder and as you can see I had downloaded this a few times to create this tutorial I'll just click on any one of these and I'll extract it now I'm going to just extract it to my downloads folder but you could choose to download it to your portable thumb drive as well okay there are three files here but really the only file that you need is the search my files executable file so this is the one that you'll double click to run the application what I like to do with this is just to drag it to my start bar so that it's pinned okay so I can run this at any time I've done this before as you can see here so I'm just going to delete this and that's it as far as the download now again I want to specify that we haven't installed anything to this computer this is just a self-extracting application that you can keep it on your portable drive and run it on any host computer Windows host computer and we have the application pinned here but it's actually not installed on our computer so I just want to make that point clear now when you click on the executable file to run the application you'll see that there are two windows that pop up this top window the smaller window is where you put in your Source parameter and the window that is in the back the larger window you see is where you'll see the progress as the program scans through your files so we'll start with the search options the first is the search mode even though we're trying to find and remove duplicate files this program actually does search really well as well so if you hit the drop down you can see and we're only going to focus on duplicate files we have two options for that we have duplicate good search and duplicate name search let's talk about the duplicate search in this mode the program makes binary comparison of the files the zeros and the ones so looking at things like whether the file has the exact same file size byte by byte this is the mode that I generally use since in most cases the duplicate files will not have the same file name for example if I downloaded something from my Chrome browser as you saw in the earlier example of me downloading search my files multiple times and it gets the parentheses one two and three so in essence they're all different file names but there are three duplicate files right so when I search for duplicate files for the purpose of deleting them I care less about the file name than the actual content the second option is duplicate names search mode so here in the duplicate name search mode you have four options you have show all duplicate names files and folder with this option it'll find matches in the exact file and folder name only it doesn't care whether the actual contents are the same the second option is the same as the first except that it ignores folders with the same names the third option Narrows the focus to files that have both the matching named and content and then the last option finds files with duplicate names with non-matching content so you you may have different versions of files with the same name saved in different folders in this case it's helpful to identify these so that they can be organized properly base folders this is where you'll specify which folders you want to scan for duplicates so for example I'm going to hit browse and navigate to my downloads folder hit OK if you want to scan for multiple locations you keep going back so I'm going to hit browse again and this time I'm going to scan in my external drive and hit OK there so now you have two locations they're separated by semicolon okay and I also want to bring your attention to you have an option to scan subfolders in the following depth so that means when you specify a folder here if they have subfolders nested underneath it will scan those subfolders as well as long as you have this box checked I advise you to start with specific folders maybe smaller folders and expand out as needed because remember the files are not indexed so you don't want to hit scan my C drive because that could take a really long time and this is a good place to stop and tell you that while I am going to show you the specifics of using the other search options and all the different fields in this box for General use cases you can stop here and just start search if you don't want to geek out and really you know dialing in your search options you can skip to the timestamp on the screen here now if you do decide to scan through your entire hard drive and want to just exclude specific folders like your system folder you can specify them here again you can just go to browse and select those folders that you want to exclude from your scan now on the other hand if you want to include specific subfolders to the base folders that you chose then you can specify them here now the file wild cards are super useful this is where you can specify if you want to search for specific types like photos documents music and so forth or if you're looking for duplicates that have specific keywords in the file name you can type the keyword surrounded by the wildcards you can specify a wild card for subfolders here also if you want to scan all folders that has the word projects for example you can surround the word with wild cards you can exclude files with certain extensions such as zip for example or change the option to exclude files using wildcards you can specify multiple exclusion criteria by separating them with semicolon or comma you can also scan files that have specific text or binary sequence in them but this is not really relevant for finding duplicates so we'll skip it you can specify duplicate search in specific size range so this is helpful if you want to limit your search to those Mega large files you can specify the size in terms of bytes and as mentioned earlier if you want to scan the subfolders to the base folders that you chose then make sure this box is checked the second option here is to scan for NTFS symbolic link slash Junction point this is if you want to search through your Cloud drives like OneDrive but we will skip for the sake of this video here you can select specific file attributes for duplicate search I recommend leaving all of them set to both and no file name length filter file time similarly for file time leave all Fields set to all times so the very last option here is to stop the search after finding specific number of files I generally leave the default to 10 000 files but if you want to change this to make the number even bigger or smaller you can set that here now that we've reviewed the different search options let's dial in our settings here so for search mode I've selected duplicate search and for base folders I've selected three different folders the rest I'm going to leave at the default setting and start search now you can see some activities happen in the back I'm going to minimize this and on the bottom left of the screen you can see the progress with the percentage of completion showing and on the top left you have the option to stop this process if you feel that this is going to take too long and you want to continue this later the other important field is the duplicate group they're all showing zero because the process is not complete yet but as you can see once the scan is completed the files will get the duplicate group number now this is very important which I'll explain in a minute but the group numbers are needed so that you could efficiently delete all of your duplicate files now looking at the scan results there's a lot going on here but don't get overwhelmed because it's actually pretty straightforward if you look at the First Column it's just listing out all the file names okay that's file name folder this is where the files were found size this is the file size modify Time created time these are pretty straightforward information the two two columns that are important for our purpose are the duplicate number column and the duplicate group column and I'll explain in a minute now to make things easier I do want to scroll down to give you a good example so to make this tutorial I had to go through a few dry runs and as you can see I downloaded the search my files application multiple times the first time I downloaded it it went to my download folder and it was just name search my files.zip the second time I downloaded the file it took on the the suffix of parentheses one close parentheses and then this the third time I got the number two and the fourth time it got the number three okay so we know that these are the exact same files they're actually sitting in the same folder doesn't matter you can see all of the same size we know that they are the same file so if I were to look at the duplicate number they all have the number 115. so this is the 100 and 15th duplicate file that this program found and they all get assigned the number 115 because they're all the same all of the files with the duplicate number 114 they're the same 113 they're the same okay and if you look at the group number you can see that the top file is the first file that the scan found and then the group number two indicates it's the second file that it found so any file with the group number two and above indicate that they are duplicates and they can safely be deleted so I do want you to spot check to make sure that things are looking correct so for example if you were to look at the duplicate number 116 you see that we have two files here the first is img0002 the second file is Walgreens FSA they are saved in two different locations but if you look at the attributes they have the same size and they seem to be the same file so without is Right Mouse click on one of them open selected file or you can hit the shortcut F9 and open one up then I'll go to the second file same thing F9 and open the second now if I put them side by side you can see that they are in fact the same file they're both a receipt from Walgreens so I'm going to close them out so it is a good idea to spot check a few files before you decide to bulk delete everything otherwise just go to your duplicate group sort it into sending order and essentially go down to where the number changes to two select everything to and above by holding on to the shift key right Mouse click and delete selected file and hit yes whenever we delete a large number of files from our computer we need to be careful we don't want to accidentally delete important files so I suggest that you store small and scan for duplicate files in just a few small folders until you have a good understanding of the search parameters applied also it's a good idea to keep a backup of the files before you delete them this way if you realize that you deleted something that you shouldn't have you have a copy available that you can retrieve you can keep this back up for a few months and delete them when you're sure that you don't need them anymore anyways I hope you found this video helpful if it was please hit the Thumbs Up And subscribe to my channel for more contents like this thanks [Music]

Channel: Andy Park

Views: 25,545

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Id: KEgAwXGVds4

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2023