Just how fast does your hard drive appear to be filling up these days? It doesn’t matter if you purchase the latest terabyte monster or are running a more humble 80GB drive, it’s amazing how quickly all that space can quickly disappear.

If you’re the kind of person who finds themselves making multiple copies of files for whatever reason, a lot of that space can be reclaimed simply by searching for – and deleting – those redundant files. But it can be a risky business – what if you delete the wrong file? That’s where Auslogics Duplicate File Finder comes in, bounding to the rescue. Version 2.1 of the program, released today, promises improved stability, an end to memory leaks and better memory optimisation.

Auslogics Duplicate File Finder allows you to search your choice of drives and folders for duplicate files. You can search for all file types, or limit your search to a selection of video, audio, image, archive and application files, which is where most space is likely to be consumed.

The program then performs a three-pass scan of your drives for filenames, modified dates and – critically – MD5 checksums, which ensures the program’s unlikely to mistake files as duplicates where they don’t exist. Some files may have had their names or modified dates changed for whatever reason, so you can untick these checks to have the computer search  simply by MD5 checksum.

After the scan completes, a list of duplicates are listed – it’s up to you to choose which ones to delete by ticking them, or right-click for more options (such as being able to select all duplicates within the same folder or group as the currently selected files). Once done, you can then delete your duplicates.

For safety’s sake the program deletes to the Recycle bin by default, but you can either delete immediately, or have all selected items archived in the Auslogics Rescue Center instead of deleting them, which gives you a fail-safe backup to access should you accidentally delete the wrong file.

Auslogics Duplicate File Finder 2.1 is a free download for personal and non-commercial use, and requires a PC running Windows XP, Server, Vista or 7 (32-bit and 64-bit supported).