duplicates

It can be a challenge to maintain a pristine music collection once you've migrated to a digital library. With all the moving, copying, downloading, ripping, and transferring files that sometimes goes on, many of us are bound to end up with some duplicate tracks scattered around our hard drives. If you want to get things all nice and tidy again--not to mention clear up some space on your computer--Similarity is here to help. This fairly basic utility scans your system for music files and helps you locate and delete dupes.

Similarity is a quick and light app, with limited … Read more

Fast Duplicate File Finder is a free version of a shareware tool. If you've tried duplicate finders before and are still recovering, not to worry: Fast Duplicate File Finder uses advanced algorithms that compare the actual binary content of a wide range of file types, not just name, size, and other attributes that may or may not be accurate indicators of duplicate files. It can search not only for 100 percent duplicates but also for similar files based on a variable level of similarity. As with all duplicate file finders, we recommend checking carefully before you delete anything it … Read more

Carbon Copy Cloner is a simple, donation-ware utility for cloning entire drives, performing incremental backups, and scheduling ongoing backups. This app has a long track record as one of the most useful and reliable disk utilities available, and its interface and features (especially for scheduling) have only gotten better. Its also kept up with the Mac OS, adding support for HFS+ filesystem compression. Other recent updates have integrated support and documentation into the app better, speeded up recovery of files from damaged volumes, and ensured that Carbon Copy Cloner excludes the Time Machine database.

Carbon Copy Cloner makes it very … Read more

With hard disks in the terabyte range, many users think they don't need to worry about duplicate files, but duplicates still waste useful space and resources, slow your system down, and fragment your archives. Heatsoft's free Clone Cleaner Lite is ready to help you root out duplicate files on your system. It identifies duplicates by several methods and gives you the option to remove them or copy them to a specified directory, so you can clean up and organize your files without accidentally deleting anything important.

Clone Cleaner Lite's businesslike interface features resizable main panels for adding … Read more

When migrating your iTunes library from one computer to another, you may find that all the songs have been duplicated in their storage locations on the hard drive and have been given a naming pattern to differentiate it from its corresponding duplicate. For most cases of file duplication an easy approach may be easy to just remove the duplicated file; however, in the case of iTunes libraries there can be thousands of files in multiple directories.… Read more

When we first downloaded IDPhotoStudio, we figured that, based on its name, it would be a program that helps users capture and edit images to be used on photo IDs. Apparently, our expectations were too high. We can't really imagine any circumstance under which IDPhotoStudio would be useful; although it works, we're just not sure what the point is.

The program's interface is basic and easy to figure out, simply because the program doesn't have many features. Users load a photo, then select the size they want to use from a drop-down menu that has sizes … Read more

This step-by-step file duplicate finder will help you quickly locate and delete redundant files; however, we recommend that novices proceed with caution when it comes to deleting any found duplicate files.

Easy Duplicate Finder uses a three-step process to quickly and easily locate and remove duplicate files from your system. Simply add the folders you wish to scan and define the file mask (all files, JPEG, MP3) from the drop-down menu. Click the Start button in Step 2 and the program very quickly displays any found duplicates. While the program is scanning your system, you can actively watch the numbers … Read more

It doesn't take long for a computer to collect duplicate copies of all sorts of files. When my year-old laptop started running low on disk space, I knew one of the fastest ways to recover some lost hard-disk storage was to give the machine's duplicate files the boot. If you rely on the file-management tools in Windows to root out unnecessary, space-clogging files, you're in for a long day of folder hopping.

Several free utilities promise to hasten the file-cleanup process. The two I tried — Duplicate File Finder from Auslogics and Digital Volcano's Duplicate Cleaner — take … Read more

RealWorld Graphics' Cursor Editor is a nifty free app that you can use to create and edit special Windows cursors, including both static and animated designs. Drag-and-drop functionality, built-in drawing tools and image filters, correction capabilities, and support for sophisticated image-handling features such as layers and arbitrary selections give it capabilities we've usually seen only in large graphics packages that typically have correspondingly large prices. It can create custom icons, too.

A full Windows installer includes an optional component to support translations via community-made language packs, which we appreciate as a feature but declined to install. The clean and … Read more