A new feature of Duplicate File Detective v3.0 that's receiving a lot of praise is its ability to replace duplicate files with shell shortcuts.

This is a very powerful concept, allowing for removal of duplicate files while still allowing end users to access to the original copy through the previous file location. This feature is implemented in Duplicate File Detective as part of the Duplicate Result Manager dialog window:

As you can see in the screen shot above, there is an option to replace moved or deleted duplicates with shell shortcuts to their unmarked siblings. The option becomes available anytime you execute an operation that results in the movement or deletion of duplicate files.

So how exactly does duplicate file shortcut linking work? The key is to remember that Duplicate File Detective organizes duplicate files into groups. In the screen shot below, you can see that each duplicate file group has an alternating background color, as well as unique group number (as shown below the Group column header). Also note that, in the example below, we've marked all but the first duplicate file in each group.

When replacing duplicate files with shell shortcuts, the first unmarked duplicate in each group becomes the link target for all other files in the same group. In other words, in the example screen above, the first (unmarked) "tulips.jpg" file would become the shell shortcut target for all the remaining (marked) "tulip.jpg" files. If there are multiple unmarked duplicates in a group, then the first of these will be used as the shell shortcut target.

Once the Duplicate Result Manager completes file processing with the shell shortcut option engaged, the marked duplicate files of each group will be replaced by shell shortcuts to the first unmarked duplicate in the same group.

The modern home or professional computing user’s appetitive for disk space just keeps on growing, primarily because of our ever-evolving ability to digitize critical elements of our personal and business lives.

At home, people are amassing large volumes of documents, images, music files, and videos. In particular, modern digital photo and video cameras produce very large, high-resolution content files that consume considerable amounts of disk space. And how often have you downloaded and saved a file (be it an application, image, video, or whatnot) a second (or even third) time simply because you couldn’t quickly find the original that you knew existed somewhere on your hard drive?

In the business arena, we’re working to digitize our document libraries to improve efficiency and reduce use of paper products, often creating duplication along the way. We’re maintaining large image and video repositories for archival and analysis purposes. And, we’re keeping these items in storage areas (often accessed through a local area network), portions of which are often allocated to users who download (or exchange via email) and store the same files repeatedly.

In both the home and the office, the use of inexpensive external file storage mechanisms is also increasing. It’s not uncommon to see people carrying around one or more USB keys and copying files onto various desktop and notebook computers for immediate use. Many home and business computing users also utilize one more larger external (eSATA, USB, or FireWire) storage volumes. All of these storage devices can quickly become cluttered with multiple copies of identical files.

And duplicate file storage has serious consequences. Not only is disk space used unnecessarily, duplicate files can also deteriorate the performance of backup processes and – in the case of the frequently-used online backup storage option – increase their expense considerably. The presence of duplicate files can also impede business collaboration when users discover multiple copies of seemingly identical documents, as well as impacting file system searches and archival processes.

Duplicate File Detective 3 is a software product designed to help users find and remove duplicate files. It can operate against local drives, network attached storage volumes, removable devices and more – and it search them all at the same time. What’s more, it contains powerful tools to help remove or archive duplicate files quickly, and safely.

With Duplicate File Detective 3, you can:

1. Reclaim wasted local and network storage resources quickly and efficiently
2. Speed up backup processes by reducing storage allocation redundancy
3. Gain visibility into what types of duplicates are consuming space and who owns them
4. Process (move, delete, or zip) duplicates safely with our built-in file management system
5. Scan and de-dupe file systems of virtually any size with our extreme scalability engine
6. Find duplicates by any combination of attributes, including content-only matching (regardless of file names) 

You can download Duplicate File Detective 3 and begin using the free, fully-functional trial version immediately.

The latest version of Duplicate File Detective - version 3.0 - is now available.

This release of Duplicate File Detective contains some powerful new features and improvements including:

1. Full unicode support
2. Support for Windows 7
3. An entirely new user interface experience
4. The ability to move or delete duplicates while creating shell shortcuts in their place
5. A completely overhauled file checksum calculation tool
6. Greatly improved scalability and efficiency
7. Duplicate file search result pruning capabilities
8. Greater flexibility in duplicate search result filtering
9. Duplicate file search logging
10. And much, much more

With the release of Duplicate File Detective 3.0, we've taken your ability to find and remove duplicate files to the next level.

Please download the free trial today.