File Duplicate Files

Warning: The files that you delete using this tool are entirely your selection. Ace can only find duplicate copies of files ; it can't tell which one is the duplicate/unneeded. In short, not all files found are candidates for removal.

Duplicate files can begin appearing in your system for a number of reasons, and can have a number of detrimental results aside from wasting your drive space. Frequent copying , installation, etc of files and programs creates duplicate copies of files in your disk, consuming disk space and slowing down your system. The purpose of this utility is to find out such duplicate copies.

Usage

• Click 'Drives' to select the drives on your hard disk you want to scan , by checking the appropriate drives.
• There are many options you can set in using this tool. Click Options to do so.
• Click the 'Scan' icon below the folder .Wait for the process to complete, when the 'Please wait' dialog box will be gone. This might take some time. All system files will be skipped.
• All the duplicate file groups will be listed. From each group, keep the original copy, and check mark the duplicate copy, by viewing the properties/viewing the file by opening with its associated program. Click 'Delete' icon to remove all the check marked files. By default all deleted files are sent to the recycle bin.

The above picture shows the correct way of marking files for deletion. See that the unneeded duplicate files of each group have been marked for deletion.

By default, this tool searches for duplicates files of certain file types only as shown in the Option. But it can be set to scan for all files.

The tool have preset options for finding files with same name and size.

Two or more files with the same name is a good indicator of duplicates. But it is quite possible that two totally unrelated files may exist with the same name which are not duplicates. This option alone provides very unreliable matching. In this context comes another useful option 'Same Size'. These  two options coupled is almost good. To further enforce the duplicate nature, we have provided a very strong feature called 'CRC-32 Checking'. If this criteria is also included into scanning, you will get only duplicate files in every sense.

Adding new file types: If you are experienced with windows file types, you may wish to customize the pre-built list. You may add new file extensions and wildcard filters to the saved list of file types. Click the 'Add' button and specify the file type. As simple as that.

To remove an existing type, select the file type entry from the list and click 'Remove' button.

The duplicate file finder has a built-in ignore list to ignore certain file types, like *.dll, *.ocx, system files, etc. This make it safer. Read about ignore lists for more information.