Duplicate Files Search & Link

Duplicate Files Search & Link

Duplicate Files Search & Link (Duplicate Searcher) is an application for searching duplicate files (clones) and NTFS hard links as well symbolic links to the same file. It searches duplicate file contents regardless of file name (byte-by-byte comparison is used). This application allows not only to delete duplicate files or to move them to another location, but to replace duplicates with NTFS hard links or symbolic links as well (unique!).

This application was developed because I haven’t find any similar application which allows to operate NTFS-links.

A NTFS hard link is the file system representation of a file by which more than one path can refer a single file in the same partition. NTFS hard links allow several files to share the same space on the disk (the same file). For example, several applications can use NTFS-links to the same version of the library instead using different copies of the library files. If several hard links point to the one file, deleting of any hard links doesn't cause deleting of the file and freeing disk space until the last hard link to the file will be deleted.

 

Features:

• Free for non-commercial use.
  Donations to support a further development are welcome! ;)

• Fast search engine can scan multiple independent drives at once or multiple files on the same SSD.

• Identify directory entries that already share a single linked file (hard or symbolic link) on Windows NTFS partitions.

  *Starting from version 6 also supports hard or symbolic links on Linux EXT2, EXT3, EXT4 partitions (tested only with EXT-partitions mounted with Ext2Fsd-driver for Windows).

• Identify audio, video and JPG files that contain identical media content but have different metadata information. (Unique and new in version 7!)

• Replace files with hard or symbolic links. (unique!)

  Replacing files with hard link means to link multiple directory entries (file names) to a single file on the same logical drive (aka volume/partition).
  Warning! Be very careful by linking system files, back-up files and files which can be altered by the user or OS. Hard or symbolic links aren't independent files anymore, all the links point to single file and, if the file is being overwritten using any of link, all other links will also point to the new content.

• Detailed visualisation of duplicate files, NTFS hard links, symbolic links and junction points.

• Filter and sort files in many ways, including by fragmentation and hard links count.

• Supports long paths (path longer than 260 characters). Many other applications don't support long paths.