Whilst the vast amount of storage available in the typical home server is a great advantage to the owner, over time, as more and more movies, photos, audio files and documents are added to your shared folders it can be difficult to keep those files in order. One of the trickier challenges can be managing duplicate files – if like me, you’re forever moving files between PCs or indeed, between home servers (!) it’s easy to duplicate files in multiple folders particularly if you have large photo and audio collections.
A new add-in, Duplicate File Finder for Windows Home Server from Bassic Technologies, aims to solve that issue. You can probably guess what it does from the name – that’s right, it automates the process of identifying duplicate files on your home server’s shared folders, allowing you to delete those duplicates and release storage space.
In their words:
When you have built up your collection of files on your Windows Home Server, you probably have realized that the number of files on your system is huge. Let alone the size of those files. How do you know that you haven’t got a lot of duplicates? Duplicate files takes up a lot of hard disk space without any reason.
How do you remediate this?
We at Bassic Technologies can now proudly preset our latest product: the Duplicate File Finder for Windows Home Server. This is a plug-in for your Windows Home Server console that lets you easily find and delete any duplicate files on your Windows Home Server shares.
Install the add-in, and once your license key has been submitted, the first port of call is the add-in’s Settings Tab, which allows some basic tweaking of how the add-in searches and identifies duplicate files.
Find Pattern allows the search to be limited to specific filenames, file types and wildcards and duplicates can compared by both file size and MD5 checksum to ensure they are exact copies. The number of results displayed per page can be configured, with 500 items as the default. One great of the add-in feature is the ability to delete files using the Recycle Bin on the home server or not – using the Recycle Bin (accessible only via remote desktop) at least ensures you have a fallback copy of the file which can be restored if you wish. A manual check for updates is also available, although the add-in will notify you automatically when a new versions is available for download.
On to the main event! The add-in installs a tab in the Windows Home Server Console with a list of your Shared Folders in the left hand pane, and panels for your search results taking the majority of the screen. The bottom right pane holds a log of the search which updates throughout the process.
To search for duplicates, you simply select the shared folders you wish to include in the search by right-clicking and choosing Include in Scan (the icon next to the folder will turn green) then select Start scan in the command bar. Simple. The add-in will then handle the rest for you. I tested the add-in with my Music collection – according to Windows Explorer, there are 77,237 files in the shared folder, and I’m sure there are quite a few duplicate tracks in there.
Clicking Start Scan kicks off the search process, with the add-in performing an initial sweep of the files very quickly, before calculating MD5 hashes for each file and performing the comparison. The scan took a little over 30 minutes, which for the number of files involved, is not too bad – you can set the scan going, and come back to it at a later time.
When the scan completes, Duplicate File Finder presents a list of files that it has found in multiple locations on your home server. You can see the file name and path, file size, MD5 Checksum, and Last Modified date. You can navigate through the files found with the page numbers at the bottom of the page. The example below shows an MP3 audio track (“Gorecki” by Lamb) which has been found in two separate folders.
Right clicking the file allows you to bring up the Windows File Properties dialog:
To double check, I opened up my Music share in Windows Explorer – sure enough, I have two folders with the same tracks, named slightly differently. These are definitely duplicates.
The add-in doesn’t let you jump to Windows Explorer to view the files, but that would be a great feature in a subsequent release.
To delete duplicate files, you right click and select the files you wish to remove, before selecting the Delete command from the command bar – if you have a lot of files to remove, this is a cumbersome way to select files. Using the Shift and Control keys in conjunction with the mouse would be a lot neater, as you do in Windows Explorer, speeding up the process for working with duplicate files.
Delete a file, and the log will be updated, although you’ll notice from the screenshot that the file does not disappear from the search pane automatically – another rough edge to smooth out.
The add-in does have the odd glitch – page numbers are displayed on screen before a search has been run. Clicking on one of these numbers causes the add-in to crash the console. It’s a glaring issue that we should not expect to see in a commercial add-in (or for that reason, a free add-in), and needs to be cleaned up quickly. We’ve been in touch with Bassic about the issue, and they told us it will be fixed in the next release. As a commercial add-in, Duplicate File Finder needs to meet a certain quality bar (that we tend not to see in many free add-ins) to justify the price. We’d expect the add-in to have no major bugs, work as described with a decent user experience, with support available in the event of any issues. Whilst the add-in delivers well on its intent, we’d expect it to be bug free before shipping, and there’s certainly room for improvement in term of usability. A technical support address support@bassictech.com is published on Bassic’s website for queries.
Duplicate File Finder for Windows Home Server is $14.95, which includes updates through the life of the 1.x version. Bassic also promise significant discounts on major upgrades of the add-in to registered users. A limited 30 day trial is available to try the add-in for yourself. For those with large collections of photos, music and videos or other files, Duplicate File Finder is a useful add-in that, whilst it wouldn’t be used on a daily basis, will help keep shared folders tidy when used from time to time – $14.95 is not a huge outlay if you have the need to keep your data organised (as clearly I do!). To over-deliver on that price, I’d like to see the ability to include folders on networked attached computers available as an option, so you can search for duplicates across all of your devices – from there, intelligent data de-duplication and aggregation is easily within reach.
For now, we can’t whole heartedly recommend Duplicate File Finder until that page navigation bug is fixed – once that’s resolved, and you’re happy to spend time working diligently through your duplicate files it’s a useful add-in for those with large media collections.
Update (6th July 2010):
Further to our review, Bassic have released an update for the add-in which fixes a number of the issues raised in our review:
http://blog.bassictech.com/2010/07/07/a-new-version-of-the-whs-duplicate-file-finder-released/
- Fixed: crash when clicking on orphaned page links
- Fixed: orphaned page links on startup
- Fixed: deleted files also removed from list
- Added Open folder in Windows Explorer on item right-click menu.
- Added Unselect all on item right-click menu
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