Of all the files that clutter our hard drives and take up valuable disk space, none are more useless than duplicate files. They’re worse than useless—taking up extra space in our backups and cluttering our file lists.

Duplicate files come in a variety of flavors. In addition to exact copies of files, you may have very similar images, music files that contain the same song ripped from different sources, or text documents that are almost the same but contain a few lines of unique text. These tools will help you remove duplicate files to whip your file collection into shape and free up valuable disk space.

Before we dive into complex tools to get rid of duplicate files, let's first look at what we can do manually—right from our Windows PC. First off, you can use the search bar at the top of Windows Explorer. Before you do that, though, it’s a good idea to sort out your files. Here’s how:

  1. Click on View on the top taskbar and select Preview pane. Then select Details from the Layout section.
  2. Now go to the Current View, select Group by and sort your files by either name, type, or any other available format.

Now that you’ve sorted things a bit, here’s what you’ve to do: If you know the name or type of the files you want to get rid of, simply go to the search bar, type in the file's name, and wait for the search results to refine. From here, you can delete all the duplicated files. It’s clear that this method will be successful only when the number of duplicate files isn’t too large. Or you’ll just be deleting your files for a while!

Third-Party Apps You Can Try

While deleting your Windows files selectively has its place, some PC bugs always call for a professional app. Even though the manual method above can definitely help you in sorting out your files and then deleting them, it's super inefficient. So if you have many duplicate files, it's better to rely on a third-party app. Windows being the most popular desktop operating system has no dearth of such apps. We've rounded up some of the best apps to remove duplicate files available on Windows. Let's go over them one by one.

1. dupeGuru

dupeGuru is an easy-to-use tool for finding duplicate files. It can check for duplicate files based on their file names or contents. Its “fuzzy matching algorithm” allows it to detect duplicate files when their file names or contents are similar, but not the same exactly.

dupeGuru is simple to use—add one or more folders, click Scan, and it will tell you which files are duplicates. You can delete the files from within dupeGuru. While you can try dupeGuru for free, you’ll have to buy it if you want to delete more than ten files at a time.

dupeguru

dupeGuru is cross-platform. It works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. For more information about dupeGuru, check our piece about the best tools to remove duplicate Linux files.

2. Duplicate Music Files Finder

Duplicate Music Files Finder is focused only on music files. It works where other duplicate file finders won’t, by checking each MP3’s tags and comparing their song names. If you’ve ripped your own music from CDs or downloaded music from a variety of sources, you may have duplicate songs. If you ripped them with different quality settings, they won’t appear as duplicate files in most duplicate-finding programs—but they’re the same songs, nonetheless.

To enable this setting, click the Options button and select Use Tag Information after installing the program.

duplicate music files finder

Add one or more folders and the application will show you which files have the same tags, even if they have different file names and sizes.

3. Duplicate Cleaner

duplicate cleaner

Duplicate Cleaner is another powerful duplicate file-finder. While its free version lacks some of its more advanced options, it will still do an impressive job of finding duplicate and similar files on your hard drive. The selection assistant allows you to easily mark which files you want to delete, which is useful if you'd like the files in a specific folder.

While its interface has changed a bit, it still offers the same features.

4. WinMerge

winmerge main menu

WinMerge isn’t like other duplicate file-finding tools. It’s focused on locating and merging similar files. For example, you may have multiple copies of a text document, each with a few different lines. Maybe you edited them both, and you aren’t sure which is the latest copy. Maybe each contains important information. If you don’t want to lose anything, WinMerge will give you a side-by-side look at the differences between the files and allow you to merge them.

When you use WinMerge, you choose a “left” folder and a “right” folder to compare. WinMerge works best if you have the files in different locations—for example, you may have a version of the file on your computer and another version on your USB drive.

5. Easy Duplicate Finder

easy duplicate finder

Like dupeGuru, Duplicate Finder is available for a multitude of devices and platforms. From removing junk in your Windows or Macs, to freeing up space on iTunes or Dropbox, with Duplicate Finder you can do it all.

The free duplicate filer remover comes with 10+ different scan and search modes. No surprise, this helps users tackle the problem of duplicity from a number of angles.

Another feature that caught our attention was the Undo button. To err is human, so it isn’t surprising you might’ve to fall back on this option if you end up deleting the wrong files.

More Tools To Free Up Space

Hopefully, one of these tools helped you remove your duplicate files on Windows. If you want to free up more space on your hard drive, check out CCleaner, which deletes temporary files and other unimportant data. However, if you just want to see what's eating up space on your hard drive, try WinDirStat.

How many duplicate files did you have lying around? Which duplicate file finder do you prefer? Leave a comment and let us know.