Duplicate & Same Files Searcher is an advanced tool for locating and dealing with duplicate files.
The program locates files with identical content only; unlike some similar tools, you can't compare files just on their names, dates or size. This makes Duplicate & Same Files Searcher relatively slow, as it must read and process every single file in your selected group.
Fortunately there are some ways to improve performance. You can direct the program to scan a particular folder tree only (C:\Users\MyName), to examine files of a particular type (*.mp3, *.jpg), to ignore others (*.iso, *.exe), to check only files of a defined size.
There are some options you won't often see elsewhere. You can have the program check for (or ignore) differences in alternate data streams, to ignore different ID3 tags in MP3s, to skip symbolic links (or not).
When the scan is complete, each set of duplicates is listed, along with their file names, paths, size, dates, even their number of fragments (whether they're fragmented or not).
There's a very lengthy context menu. Right-click a file and you're able to open it, launch Explorer at its containing folder, delete, rename, or copy it to your clipboard.
Once you've selected the files you don't need, you can have the program delete them all, compress them, or move them to a folder somewhere.
Perhaps best of all (if you know what you're doing) there's even an option to replace the files with hard links. This means you can have a single file referenced by multiple paths on the same volume, so for example the hard links C:\Here\File.dll, C:\There\File.dll and C:\Everywhere\File.dll would only require the file space for one copy of File.dll.
Verdict:
Duplicate & Same Files Searcher's ability to replace duplicates with hard links is a powerful feature, but if you're not used to the concept then it can be also be confusing. This isn't a program for NTFS beginners, or anyone who doesn't have a full system backup to hand.
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