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Find and remove duplicate files

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Kristian_CE:
PilotMan software has released Clone Tools, a new windows program that helps you find, remove and organize both duplicated files and folders with similar or identical content.

When working with images, mp3:s or other documents, making backups, or just accessing the internet it is easy to accumulate a lot of files that are in fact clones, they have the exact same contents. It is near impossible to find these files manually. Clone Tools helps you find and remove these duplicate files

Finding the duplicate files is often not enough. Recognizing which files to keep and which to remove is the hard part. Clone Tools helps you take a step back, explore and compare the folders that contain the duplicate files. This gives a better overview than other programs that just lists the duplicate files; and makes it easier to make decisions about which files to save and which to remove. The program also have automatic functions that removes all duplicates from a folder or merges two folders, leaving only one folder with no duplicates in it.

Clone Tools Offers a New Perspective
Clone Tools have a unique way of viewing and exploring duplicate files. The traditional way duplicate file finders presents the results is focused on the files themselves, this makes it hard to get an overview of  the file structures. Clone Tools takes a different approach by focusing on the folders instead, you can immediately see which folders have similar contents. The program lets you explore and work with the contents of these folders in a side by side browser. This browser displays all files and folders in two folders, side by side; this gives you an immediate overview the files of the folders and you can easily see which files have duplicates in the other folder. This way of viewing the files in the context of the other files in the folder gives you better control and it is easier to make informed decisions about what to do with the files and the folders that contain duplicates, you can delete them, move them or simply leave them.



Find and Remove Duplicate Files Safe
When using a program to find and remove files it is very important that it is safe to use, you do not want to accidentally delete important files. Clone Tools uses a byte by byte scan on the files to determine if they are duplicates. This makes sure that the files are 100% identical. Files that are not duplicates can not be deleted by Clone Tools; you can never accidentally remove the last copy of a file. The deleted files will be placed in the recycle bin; if you change your mind you can recover the files.

Further information and a free trial download is available at http://www.pilotman.com

f0dder:
Clone Tools uses a byte by byte scan on the files to determine if they are duplicates.
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Does this mean you keep doing byte-by-byte compare of one file to the "suspected clones", or are you doing the smart thing and comparing MD5/SHA/... hashes?

Kristian_CE:
The clone scan is performed in several steps. First there is a preliminary scan based on hash values and only the suspected duplicate files that passes this scan are compared in a complete byte by byte scan. Also if there are more than one copy of a file, lets say there are three identical files A, B and C then A is compared to B and then B to C but A is not compared to C since we already know that it is identical to B and thus also to C.

I would say that the scan algorithm is very efficient and also 100% secure as all clones are verified in a byte-by-byte scan.

f0dder:
It seems a bit wasteful doing byte-by-byte checking if you're using a secure hash - after all, the cryptographic hashes are designed so a single bit difference should yield a large hash difference... but I guess byte-by-byte is an OK option for the paranoid people ;)

I assume you start off by only considering files with the same size, not blindly calculating hashes for every file? :)

Kristian_CE:
Yes Clone Tools only compares files that have the same size.

A complete byte by byte scan is the only 100% secure method. Even if it is very unlikely that a good hash algorithm would produce the same hash for two different files it would not be 100% accurate but rather 99.999999999% or so.

Another feature of clone tools is that it is possible to start working with the scan result before the complete byte by byte scan is ready while the scan keeps going in the background (with the smallest files being compared first). This means that you can start cleaning your hard drive withour having to wait for Clone Tools comparing your dvd files etc. It is however not possible to delete any files that have not been verified by the byte by byte scan.

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