Review: DeCloner 1.0
- Article 77 of 89
- MacFormat, October 2009
Find the duplicate files that have been filling up your hard drive then trash them
When you’re pushed for hard drive space, the quickest way to reclaim it is to delete files. But which ones? Getting rid of duplicate files is obviously better than getting rid of more vital files, but finding them isn’t easy: they can be scattered all over your hard drive and given different names.
PixelEspresso’s Decloner is an attempt to make finding duplicate files easier than pure guesswork. It scans whatever area of the hard drive you want and creates a ‘fingerprint’ for each file. If that fingerprint matches the fingerprint of another file, they’re the same, no matter how they may have been disguised. The program then lets you use QuickLook to view the files it thinks are duplicates to make sure it’s not imagining things. Then when you’re sure, you can get Decloner to move to the Trash any files you’ve marked as duplicates.
Running Decloner requires a few attempts to get things running satisfactorily. Numerous browser cache files and thumbnails will show up as duplicates so you’ll need to take advantage of Decloner’s filtering system. Running it on your whole hard drive will slow your system to a crawl and may result in Decloner crashing. There’s no administrator option for you to compare your files with other users’. We also found it would flag up some files as duplicates of themselves.
Decloner is a decent, but flawed utility that can help you cope with a cluttered hard drive. But the work required together with its price tag make it less desirable than a new hard drive.