zsDuplicateHunter - 2.3.0

You get 30 days to try this out. it works great and has a simple and intuitive interface.
The only thing I wish it had was a way to move things to the trash instead of "permanently delete" any duplicates.

Overall - Very Good!

After scanning one of my terabyte drives, I was informed that there were over 19,000 duplicate files. After reading the documentation (as i am always a bit wary of "duplicate removers"), I was pleased to see that there were multiple levels of protection involved. I also set up a folder to move any "removed" duplicates to (instead of outright deleting them), just to double-check before actually trashing anything. The documentation also mentions being able to chose which duplicates to trash (for instance, the older version), but as I couldn't figure out how to specify it, I hoped that when I clicked the "remove duplicates" button I would be presented with a list of choices. In a flash, I lost nearly ALL of my files - hundreds of gigabytes worth. The only thing left on the drive were a file and a folder the program couldn't seem to delete. And the folder the program said it would use instead of the trash? Empty. The folder path in the preferences dialog box now shows a path deep within the bowels of the program. Perhaps Zizasoft has a business relationship with data recovery utilities? Data Rescue X is now scanning the drive, and it is going to be hours before I will know whether or not the files are recoverable.

With this latest revision, zsDuplicateHunter has now become as perfectly reliable as is possible due to the addition of the 'comparison by digest' feature.

I no longer have many duplicates on my hard drive (thanks in part to zsDuplicateHunter), so I can't test the purportedly improved speed or see whether the crashes that I often had with broad searches of 'considerable numbers of files of various sizes' have been eliminated, especially when no filtering options are entered.

Although the checksum of a file remains unchanged when only a file name is changed, the checksum does change when only the metadata of a (music) file has changed, so you unfortunately still need to purchase a separate application for eliminating duplicate music files that have slightly varying id3 info embedded. Again, I recommend Omni Disk Sweeper for first locating and deleting the largest unneeded files on your computer.

I believe that zsDuplicateHunter is an essential utility for every Mac user, and I highly recommend it.

zsDuplicateHunter is the only duplicate-searching/deleting utility that is worthwhile for general files (PDF, txt, doc, jpg, gif, etc.), and I would have spent three times what they are asking just to have it. Why am I so enthusiastic? Well, as far as I know, this is the only such software that calculates checksums to ensure that the files are indeed duplicates, even when the name or dates have been changed by saving the same unchanged data at a different time. It has saved me months—if not years—of comparing files, all within a couple of days, enabling me to delete several thousand files already.

Although Java applications are painfully slow, I am a fan of them as well as any apps written in JavaScript, because it enables Windows and Linux developers to produce something that can be used on a Mac, thus expanding our world of options without having to work hard to convert them to our superior OS and hardware.

Unfortunately, though, zsDuplicateHunter does not search metadata, so if you want to weed out your music collection for songs that are in different formats (mp3, m4a, etc.) or those for which the actual music is exactly the same but don't have the same metadata (difference of one or more characters in the Artist, Album, Year, Composer, Genre, etc. fields), you have to use a different application after first deleting exact duplicates out with zsDuplicateHunter in case you have more than one folder of the same music.

Zizasoft warns that their implementation of CRC32 is not entirely reliable for very large files (which I assume they mean to be over about 2 GB), but I've also discovered from my own experience that you'll find hundreds of very different mbox Mail.app mailboxes that obviously contain very different messages still share the same size and checksum for some reason. If they could use a different formula for calculating checksum, such as whatever I used to use on Unix (and whatever Apple Disk Utility uses), we could save the questionable large files for these slower but more accurate calculations, as I assume their use of CRC32 is faster than other options. They warn that Adler is not as accurate as even CRC32, so I wouldn't take a chance on that.

It's unfortunate that this application does not ignore System files in the way that it does for Windows users, but maybe they'll add that ability in a future function.

If they could also add the ability to display metadata in the results for music files, or more importantly to search based on metadata without having the file name, size, or checksum match, this would truly be an all-in-one duplicate-searching/deleting utility.

I would also recommend using OmniDiskSweeper to clear out the largest unused files that are not actual duplicates on your various volumes, as I assume that zsDuplicateHunter probably uses some disk space for temp files or virtual memory to store results.

Please be aware that zsDuplicateHunter does allow free lifetime upgrades as do all products from Zizasoft. All licensed users are entitled to download new versions of zsDuplicateHunter as they are released. You can even check for updates from zsDuplicateHunter so are always assured to have the latest version. As to pricing, we believe $19.95 is a fair price for zsDuplicateHunter based on the functionality provided. Yes there are cheaper products, there are also more significantly more expensive products in this category.