Getting Started: Duplicates

A Wizard Mode is available to make it easier for the user in finding multimedia duplicates. Designed with simplicity in mind, the wizard was motivated by the fact that multimedia duplicate files take up a considerable amount of space - eliminating one duplicate file can result in a significant additional free space.

In the wizard mode, the user can select four types of data: Music files, movie files, image files and all multimedia type of files. Next, the user must select where to look for duplicate files. By default, the wizard suggests searching all the local harddrives. The user can also select individual harddrives to search for duplicate multimedia files.

Finally, before starting the multimedia search, the user can select between three methods to detect duplicates. "Very thorough" will make DiskState very meticulous in detecting true duplicates. For safety, this is the recommend mode. The Average mode will make DiskState only consider meta headers of MP3s if available. Example: Given two MP3s with slightly different actual content but equal ID3 header information (song title, category, album etc.) will be presented as duplicates in the "Average" mode. The third mode is Quick and makes DiskState skip all header information.

The Classic mode is used for more advanced searches. From this mode, the user can: 1) specify volume(s) to look for duplicate files, 2) specify starting folders on each volume, 3) enable and disable various flags and options as well as 4) setting filters on the duplicate files to investigate. Finally, there are options to use CRC-32 instead of MD5 (the former is faster but less accurate to get a unique signature of a data block), ignore files smaller than a given size or larger. The latter may be useful for multi-gigabyte AVI data files.

The rest of this section will describe the Classic mode in more detail.

Import

If you have saved a previous duplicate search result, you can import the search results by clicking on the "Import" button to the upper right. This import file must have previously been exported as binary via the Export tool found in the duplicate files result window. The latter is accessible in the Results window - click Export and then select Binary.

Please note that import does not fill out the version and file type fields in the search results. This is done to enhance the speed of importing large duplicate search results.

Where to search

You can ask DiskState to look in multiple volumes. By default, DiskState will look in the root folder and traverse down the folder structure.

Select volumes you would like to search through.

For each volume, you can alter the start path for the search by clicking on the small folder icon to the left.

Ordering a duplicate search operation involving several volumes, makes DiskState treat the your selection as one single volume. Thus, it will look for duplicate files across several volumes - just as one big volume were scanned.

Filter

If you don't want DiskState to traverse through all the folders in the subtree, be sure to check the "Non-recursive" box.

Normally DiskState ignores system files. If you are an expert user, you can override this safety setting (not recommended).

You can also specify a regular expression for the files to check. For example, you only want to check for duplicate zip archives across all your volumes (use .*\.zip for this). The "Filter" button can be found in the left bottom of the window.

Other filters are available to ignore files smaller than a given size and limit the maximum content check size.

Tip: DiskState remembers the start path of each volume.

Tip: If you want to restore the search paths to the initial settings, click the "Defaults" button. "Clear" button makes all the start paths equal the root folder.