Duplicate Detective: Cleaner 4+

Like past reviewers have said, it tends to take a while to scan a folder. I had to leave it running overnight to get it to finish its scan. But the scan seems to get all the duplicate files and will group them by folder if all the contained files are the same (which is a really nice feature).

One bug that should be fixed in future versions: On the results page when you are selecting the files that you want to delete, the estimated size that will be made available isn’t accurate. You can recreate this bug by just toggling the checkboxes on a few items and seeing how the estimated size jumps around. For me, toggling a ~10MB file results in the estimated size jumping around by over 100GB. My scan found 100s of GBs of duplicates so I don’t know if this bug just presents itself for really big scans or it shows up in smaller scans too. The bug doesn’t really affect how well the app does its job of removing duplicates but it would be nice to have an accurate estimate of how much space would be saved.

I decided to devote some dedicated time to cleaning up my disk, and Duplicate Detective was invaluable. It scanned 600GB of files in around a minute and made deleting files much, much easier. In a recent update (I think) a prompt was added to indicate that you should check the files you want to delete (not the ones you want to keep). That was very helpful.

I gave this a 4/5 instead of a 5 because I found it tedious to use with the thousands of duplicates I had. I had to review each file separately. What I would really like is if there were options to organize the file list more compactly (more like a file manager) displaying as many duplicates as will fit on the screen and being able to tick off duplicates without having to navigate down the list one at a time.

It would also be nice to be able to organize the file list so that (for instance), Column #1 would be a list of all files in a particular directory (or directory sub tree) for which there were duplicates, and then to the right, and then one column for each directory in which a duplicate was found. Hard to explain in a review, but if developers are interested in clarifying this I'm happy to respond.

Overall, I would highly recommend this for folks who are trying to recover disk space (or get stuff to fit in a full Dropbox or Google Drive).

Well done.

I have so many pictures all over my hard drive and external hard drive. I wanted an app that would find the duplicates. Yes, it found duplicates, but not all. Once it scanned, which it took forever by the way, it would come up with some duplicates. I could take the file name that it found and put it into my Finder window and found a ton more. Too time consuming to delete them like that. It will also tell me that there is one in my Photo app and when I go to search for it, it’s gone. Or it will tell me there is one in the Photo app and one in a file folder. So I thought I’d delete the one that was showing in the folder, saving the one in the Photo app. Well it ended up deleting them both. I did NOT have them both checked, but it still deleted them both. :( Anyway … all that aside, just make sure when you hit delete that you aren’t deleting something you want to keep. :(

Going to look for another app ….