DigitalVolcano Software Support

I'm using Duplicate Cleaner 2.0.5 and on the 'Search Criteria' tab, folders appearing in the 'Available Folders' list seem to be listed in random order, making it very hard to scan a folder tree and find the folder I'm after.

Is this a bug?

Not a bug, but the folders list is just unsorted. On most of my drives they are in order (though not on the usb stick) - I guess it depends on the drive type, filing system, etc.
I will try and add a sort into the next release.

Just installed cleaner and gave a first run. The list of duplicated folders is not sorted properly, so it is impossible to go through duplicated sub-folders in order and figure out the difference in parent folder. This thread is dated 2011! Is there no work on program anymore?

What's even more alarming is that "duplicated folders" list contains folders that sometimes differ by a file or two, even though no filters set. The only way to see this difference is to click at each folder and then check for "non-duplicate" message above file list. If program knows there are non-duplicates why on earth does it show folders here?

2.0.5 is just a wee bit different from the current 3.2.4.

If you're speaking of the (Scan Location) Search Paths, you can click the column header to sort them.

If you're speaking of the Duplicate Files listing, then I believe the default sort is by Group.

You can sort by Path (again click the column header) but by doing so you will loosing the groupings.

Now that's not to say doing so does not serve a purpose. By examining the list, by Path, it may point out trends or places for further, more concise exploration.

Maybe if you'd better explain just what it is you're looking for the program to do?

And yes, since the OP started the thread, 3 years ago, the program has changed & been updated. Releases & Update News.


(Duplicate Folders is a Pro feature & I'm not familiar with it.)

therube wrote:Duplicate Folders is a Pro feature & I'm not familiar with it

And Duplicate Folders feature is exactly what I am asking about. In fact, I only bought this program hoping to get good duplicate folder finder. There are better free programs for finding files and much better for comparing folders. Unfortunately those programs great at comparing are usually bad at finding and require users to select folders for comparison. I expected $30 program to do better job.

therube wrote:Maybe if you'd better explain just what it is you're looking for the program to do?

I expect program to not show folders as equal if one of them has files not in the other. I also expect resulting list to be sorted in the normal order of traversing the source root(s), i.e alphabetically by full path. I also expected at least an option to exclude some folders from search e.g. thousands of "*_files" folders left over from old IE.

Yep, the above thread was referring to the input folder list, not the Duplicate Folder list (which didn't exist at the time).

The folders listed at duplicates in each group should have the same number of files in them, unless you have scanned with a filter - in which case you could say "these folders are duplicates when looked at through a filter". You could be ignoring any stray .bak or thumbs.db files for instance.

The folder groups are sorted by size - largest first at the top.

You could kill the "*_files" folders by selecting them in the files view using the Select by text pattern tool. These could then be dropped from the files list causing the duplicate folder list to rebuild itself. Though you are correct that some sort of simpler filter could be useful on the Duplicate folders view.

Ah, I see. My apologies for posting in the wrong thread.

However as I mentioned earlier I do not have any filters and yet the list of duplicate folders has some folders with different number of files. When I select such folder there is a message "nnn non duplicates" right above file list and the list itself shows these different files grayed out.

I see now that default sorting is indeed by total size of files in folders. However in order to analyze the results efficiently sorting by path makes much more sense, as it allows navigating the list as "flattened tree". I tried to re-order list by clicking at "folder groups/path" tab but the result was completely random order.

The regular expression .*_files did the trick, thanks for the tip. Although this is rather far from being intuitive. When I mentioned folder filtering I meant simply adding "folder filter" to "search criteria" tab where there is "file filter" already.

Speaking of _files folders, it would be great to have some king of smart handling for these by treating them together with corresponding htm/html file. Otherwise deleting the file + folder pair is a pain.