Duplicate File Hunter

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on June 11, 2012

There's no point in wasting valuable hard-drive space by keeping it cluttered with duplicate files. Duplicates happen to just about everybody at some point, whether they're the result of accidental multiple downloads, the byproduct of importing and renaming images, or some other mundane activity. Duplicate File Hunter is an easy-to-use tool that can help you locate, compare, and delete duplicate files. We've reviewed a lot of programs of this type, and Duplicate File Hunter is definitely one of the most straightforward, though not necessarily the most sophisticated.

Duplicate File Hunter's interface is all business. There are buttons across the top allowing you to search for, select, delete, and move duplicate files. You can narrow down searches somewhat, specifying the file type and file size you want to search; there's also a masking tool that lets you search a certain file name or extension. We selected a directory to search that we knew to have plenty of duplicate files in it. Duplicate File Hunter searched this folder of 2,300 items in about 40 seconds and returned 140 duplicate results. We liked that duplicates are grouped together and displayed in a list view; each set of results is shown in alternating white or green, making it easy to see which files go together. For each file, Duplicate File Hunter displays the name, path, size, and CRC32. You can select all the duplicates and delete them en masse or deal with them individually; the program also lets you print a list of duplicates. The built-in Help file is brief, but it offers an adequate overview of the program's use. Overall, we think that Duplicate File Hunter is a useful, no-frills choice for finding and deleting duplicates, and we recommend it.

Duplicate File Hunter installs and uninstalls without issues.