After a previous digital workflow article I was asked if I had experience of a program to save space by finding and removing duplicates on a hard drive. The use of a program like this this being obvious too anyone with multiple Gigabytes of .tif photographs and .mp3's clogging their hard drive. This is an all to common scenario in the modern digital darkroom.

NoClone 4 searching for duplicate files

As it happened I discovered a superb program for this exact purpose some time ago. I have now used it for Two previous versions. The software in question is a very cheap little utility called 'NoClone' which is available from Reasonable software as a download. It's at a price like their name would suggest.

Use of this utility couldn't be simpler. Simply pick some file paths to search for duplicate files. Tell the program what kind of duplicates you want to look for. Something like 'Exact content duplicate files' or 'Similar Files'. Next tell it what kind of file. An obvious choice from the drop down box being 'Images'. Click [Search] button and wait for a short time.

The program will rapidly search the folders you request and mark up what it thinks should be deleted and place it in a list next to the suspected matching duplicate file. It will pick older files or whatever other preferences you choose to set. You can check the files and delete away. Couldn't be simpler.

I saved 12.9 Gb of space on an 80 Gb Hard Drive in less than 5 minutes while I made a cup of tea. In my book that makes this software well worth it's $32.90 asking price.

Reasonable NoClone - Uncover true duplicate files; Recover valuable disk space. Free trial, download now.