If you don’t clean up duplicate files on your computer regularly, the storage space on the disk will keep shrinking and you may even get a “out of disk space” warning, especially for those computers with a small capacity SSD as the main disk. So it’s an urgent task before your device becomes stuck. In this guide, we will share the practical ways to find and remove duplicate files on Windows 11/10.
Part 1: Does Windows 11/10 have a Duplicate File Finder?
Although it is not complicated to remove duplicate files, finding each different type of duplicate file manually can be tedious, especially when there are a lot of duplicate files on the system, so many users want to know if Windows has a built-in “Duplicate File Finder” tool, the answer is “it doesn’t”.
Regardless of whether the operating system on your computer is Windows 10 or Windows 11, they do not provide any solution to help you find duplicate files with one click. If you really want to get rid of duplicate files on your computer, then iSunshare DupFiles Genius is the reliable tool you need, it can find, locate and delete duplicate files in one-click, and supports any types of files, such as image, video, and document and so on.
Part 2: How to Find and Remove Duplicate Files on Windows 11/10 in Minutes
If you have inadvertently created multiple duplicate files in different folders or disks, it will be very time-consuming to find and remove them manually. Therefore, if you need to clean up a lot of duplicate files, it is a wise choice to rely on third-party software. iSunshare DupFiles Genius can help you find and locate duplicate files quickly.
Here are the detailed steps on how to find and remove duplicate files in Windows 11/10 efficiently with the tool.
Step 1: After completing the installation of iSunshare DupFiles Genius on your computer, launch it. Click the “＋” button to add a disk or a folder to be scanned. Then click “Next“.
Step 2: On this page, you can customize the scan. For example, exclude specific folders or disks, and select the file types to scan, etc. After that, click “Start Scanning” to proceed.
Step 3: Wait for the scanning process to finish, iSunshare DupFiles Genius will list all the duplicate files according to your search criteria, and then you can check the box of the duplicate file name and click the “Delete” button to remove the duplicate files.
Tips: If you still have some concerns, you can go to check more details of the file by right-click the file name and click “Open file location” option.
Video Guide:
Part 3: How to Find Duplicate Files on Windows 11/10 without Software
As mentioned above, Windows does not provide a one-click tool to find and remove duplicate files, but if you don’t mind the tedious process and are willing to accept the challenge of patience, then manually finding duplicate files on Windows through Windows File Explorer or Command Prompt is another viable options.
Way 1: Search and Remove Duplicate Files in Windows File Explorer
In the Windows operating system, File Explorer is a tool designed to manage files, its main purpose is to enable access to files by name and support users to manually search and remove any file on Windows, including locating duplicate files.
Option 1: Find duplicate files by simple sorting
Step 1: Go to the folder or disk where you are sure duplicate files are stored. Change “View” to “Details”.
Step 2: Click on the “Sort” option bar and select “Name” as the sorting method.
Step 3: Check the displayed file information and carefully find and delete the duplicate files.
Option 2: Detect duplicate files by the Search function
Step 1: Press the “Windows+E” shortcut to open File Explorer.
Tip: If you are sharing this PC with other users, you need to go to “This PC” > “Windows C” > “Users” in the user folder. This will prevent you from deleting other people’s files by mistake.
Step 2:Type the details of the target file in the “Search box” in the upper right corner of any folder or disk and press”Enter” key.For example, if you want to find duplicate pictures, type the keyword “.pgn” to find duplicates in the directory.
Here are the various file extensions for your reference.
Images: .jpg, .jpeg, .png or .gif
Videos: .flv, .mov, .avi, .wmv, .mp4 or .3gp
Music: .mp3, .wav or .wma
Documents: .doc, .docx, .pdf, .txt
Presentations: .ppt or .pptx
Excel tables: .xls or .xlsx
Programs: .exe
Step 3: Then change the “View” to “Details” and set the “Sort” by to”Name” to find duplicate files faster.
Way 2: Find and Delete Duplicate Files by Command Prompt
The Cmd.exe (or Powershell.exe) is a command line operation tool for Windows that allows users to enter commands to perform a variety of system or program operations. Here you will learn how to find and delete duplicate files with the relevant commands.
Step 1: Press the “Windows + X” key and select the Windows Powershell (Admin) option.
Step 2: Type this command “set-location -path C:\” and press “Enter”. You can replace “C” with your target drive letter. For example, if you want to clean ssd drive , then you should enter the drive letter of the SSD.
Step 3: Enter the following command and press “Enter”.
ls “scan folder” -recurse | get-filehash | group -property hash | where { $_.count -gt 1 } | % { $_.group } | Out-File -FilePath “scan result location”
Tip: “scan folder” is the target folder and “scan result location” is the path to save the exported result file.
Step 4: After entering the command, wait a few minutes and open the file where the duplicate file detection results are stored. In this file, you can check each duplicate file and then delete them.
Or type the following script to execute the delete command.
ls “(scan folder)” -recurse | get-filehash | group -property hash | where { $_.count -gt 1 } | % { $_.group | select -skip 1 } | del
Conclusion
Duplicate files on your computer are useless, just like system cache and junk files. If you want to always clean them efficiently, then iSunshare DupFiles Genius will be your best helper. Get rid of those duplicate files right now!
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