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How to Find Duplicate Files
on your Mac

Use the Duplicate Finder for Mac feature of Disk Drill to analyze your storage space for extra files that take up valuable space. Duplicate Finder can search internal and external drives to find and delete duplicate songs, videos, images, files, and documents. MacOS Big Sur Ready!
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It can be a real pain to manually search for wasted storage space. Storage is often wasted by holding copies of files that aren’t being used. These extra files take up valuable space and eat into your storage potential and machine efficiency. Our Duplicate File Finder makes the menial task of finding wasted storage space simple by locating duplicate files and giving you the option to automatically or manually select and delete unwanted ones.

Install and Launch the App

The Duplicate Finder is one of the many features of Disk Drill. Alongside file recovery, boot imaging, and storage visualization, Disk Drill is an excellent tool for finding and deleting duplicate files for Mac.

To use Duplicate Finder, simply download Disk Drill, within the installation dialog drag it to the Applications Folder, and then launch the app. You are now on your way to saving your storage space.

Once you have the app downloaded, double-click on the downloaded file and proceed with installation. Next, launch Disk Drill from your app menu.
  • $vars.title
    1Download Disk Drill
  • $vars.title
    2Drag to Application Folder
  • $vars.title
    3Launch Disk Drill

Selecting Scan Locations

Once Disk Drill has launched, select “Find duplicates”. From here, you can either choose to drag folders directly into the Duplicate Finder, or you can select “add folder” to browse your machine for the folder you wish to analyze for duplicates.
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After the location has been added to the scan list, feel free to add additional locations to save you time and actually compare the contents of multiple folders. Free duplicate file finder mac

Scanning for Duplicate Files

Once your list of locations is complete, select “scan” from the top-right corner of the app. In just a few moments, the Duplicate Finder will analyze your locations and show you a list of each file that has one or more duplicates. Scanning for Duplicate Files

Removing Duplicate Files

Each item now displayed on the app has duplicate versions. By selecting the drop down arrow at the beginning of any given item you will be able to view the location and creation date of each duplicate of the item. You can now remove the copy of the file that is no longer wanted by checking the box on that file’s line and then selecting “remove” from the top right corner of the app. If needed, you may search through your duplicate files using the Search bar located at the bottom-left of the app. Manually deleting the duplicate for each file can be time consuming, so we created three filters to quickly delete many duplicates at once.
Remove duplicate files mac

Quick Duplicate Removal

To quickly delete all of the duplicates, select “auto”, “newest”, or “oldest” from the top of the app. Selecting “auto” will allow the app to quickly decide which duplicate of each file to delete. “Newest” will delete the duplicates created most recently and “oldest” will delete the duplicates created first, leaving the most recent ones intact.
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When using any of these filters, you have the ability to go through and check which duplicate has been chosen for deletion before selecting “remove” to delete the duplicate. Duplicate file finder mac
That’s it! These easy steps allow you to quickly and easily save storage space with free Disk Drill’s Duplicate Finder for Mac OS X.

Better Safe Than Sorry — Why Disk Drill?

In the unfortunate event of data loss, it’s always smart to have a hard drive backup on Mac. Disk Drill is packed with features to make data management easy. It offers a handy solution for almost every situation. You can create a bootable drive for data recovery: simply connect any storage device with at least 2GB of space, then select “Create Boot Drive”. To prevent a physical failure of your storage device and increase your chances of data retrieval, Disk Drill creates byte-to-byte disk backups. Also don't forget to enable Recovery Vault or Guaranteed Recovery for your work data. Your files are important, so why not keep them safe?

Frequently Asked Questions

Updated on by Disk Drill Team

Follow these steps to delete duplicate files on your Mac:

  1. Launch Disk Drill for the Mac.
  2. Click Find Duplicates from the top menu.
  3. Add locations you want to check to the search window.
  4. Press the Scan button and allow Disk Drill to perform its search.
  5. Select and delete duplicates manually or choose auto-selection.
  6. Click Remove to delete the duplicates.

Disk Drill for Mac offers free data protection and management features in its free trial version. One of these is a tool that will search selected locations on your computer for duplicate files. Disk Drill offers an intuitive and simple method of cleaning up duplicate files from your system to increase storage capacity with no financial investment in the application.

Yes, it is usually safe to delete duplicate files. You may find that you have many duplicates due to reinstalling software or generating temporary work files. There may be some instances where like-named files have been created from different apps. A safe strategy is to backup before removing duplicates in case you have removed a file that you need.

The three best duplicate file finder apps for the Mac are:

  1. Disk Drill which offers a free duplicate finder in addition to data protection tools in its trial version.
  2. MacPaw’s Gemini 2 which works well to remove duplicate files but operates via a yearly subscription.
  3. Duplicate Detective is a simple, paid application that will help you remove identical files.

Follow this procedure to delete duplicate photos on your Mac:

  1. Launch Disk Drill.
  2. Select Find duplicates.
  3. Drag and drop or add folders to the list to be searched.
  4. Click the Scan button in the upper right to locate duplicate images
  5. Select Pictures to filter the scan results to show duplicate photos.
  6. Choose the files to be deleted and click Remove.

Saving Space is Important

We know that your storage solutions are important to you. Storage is important to us too, which is why we created Disk Drill. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about Disk Drill, please feel free to contact our Technical Support Staff.
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Stop wasting your Mac disk space. Remove file duplicates with Disk Drill.

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Free duplicate file finder for Mac OS X
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Need more info? Check out other How To’s, Product Guides, and our awesome users’ kind words about our work below.

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