The Best Tool to Find Duplicate Files on Your Hard Drive (Windows)

There are many duplicate file finder tools out there for windows but we prefer DupeGuru as it is easy to use and it's very effective.

DupeGuru (it's a free tool btw) is a very great tool to have. Not only because its easy to use, but also because it's soo reliable. To start a scan, you simply add a folder to the main window and hit “Scan.” Easy peasy. After a minute or two, you’ll get a list of all the files the app found duplicates of. The original file will be highlighted in blue, while the rest will be in black, making it easy to read the list.

The best feature of the app, though, is that it actually has two separate companion apps. dupeGuru Picture Editionand dupeGuru Music Edition are specially designed to clean up your photo and music collections respectively. Picture Edition scans the contents of a picture to find dupes that may have wildly different file names or even dimensions, but that are actually the same image. It also includes a picture preview window that compares the original to the Music Edition can scan special music metadata like tags, bitrate, duration, or the content of the audio. Some of these scans can take longer, but picture and music libraries can get so out of control that they benefit from the extra attention.

The only downfall of DupeGuru is it requires up to three separate downloads to thoroughly check your library, which is annoying. While the interface is fairly clean, it’s also got a lot of advanced features that can be overwhelming to the average user. The Picture and Music editions are also fairly slow.

This isn’t necessarily bad. However, if you’ve got a big collection, you should probably start the scan and go grab a snack. Or watch a movie, if your library is really big.

SearchMyFiles is another good option that includes some heavy filtering options and robust comparison tools. You can narrow your search by file size, date and time, specific file extensions and more. It’s less useful for super speedy cleanup, but it can give you a lot more control if you want to do the work by hand.

Duplicate Files Finder is another solid, if simplistic option. While it doesn’t have a ton of unique features (it’s not even the only app with this name), it’s easily one of the fastest. It will scan specific folders and find files that have the same size, and then compare them to see if they’re identical. Because it only compares identically sized files, it’s insanely fast. However, this also limits how effective it can be at finding more vague matches. If you just want to clear up some space, it can do it with just a couple clicks. But don’t expect your hard drive to be totally free of junk afterwards.