News :: 15MR: Clone Terminator v1.0

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Clone Terminator version 1.0 by Enplase Research Corporation—A duplicate file finder and removal.

H2. Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Clone Terminator is an easy-to-use program designed to clean your computer from duplicate files. With the help of Clone Terminator, you can easily scan your drives for identical files and delete those of them that you never use. It will increase space on your drives and improve total system performance. The application searches only for TRUE duplicate files comparing the file data itself.

Clone Terminator uses an innovative algorithm that makes scanning extremely fast and reliable, ensuring 100% accuracy.”

Quick Pros

• Effectively finds all duplicates in data (Even with differences in filenames)
• Runs rather quickly
• Gives you control over deletion

Quick Cons

• Major concern about deleting needed files
• Had to redo all my FTP client settings
• No safety features?

Expansion

I am always very nervous with applications that claim ‘Free hard drive space by…’—Much can and will go wrong with inproperly coded applications or ones which have not been well thought through in the first place. With this thought, I had recently backed up my entire My Documents tree so I figured that this would be a safe place to start.

The application is surprisingly easy to use. With a step-by-step wizard, the hardest thing is wading through the resulting list of what it thinks are unnecessary duplicates and empty files. This is very daunting task for even the most experienced computer user. 328 duplicate files and 217 empty files. Surprisingly a lot but wasn’t to be expected. I was afraid to to go through the identical files list; A good number, while duplicated, are needed for sure. Quite a few ‘duplicates’ in its eyes from my Delphi directories, most of them needed. I got those out of the list. It did pick up quite a few duplicate images which was a good thing. It also picked up a LOT of duplicate 8-byte files from my FTP program. They all appeared to have nothing in them, so I let it do its thing to those. It also picked up a lot from my BattleField 2142 folder and honestly was not in the mood for reinstalling that, so I removed those as well. 95% of the empty files were ‘dummy.txt’ files, so I figured ‘why not?’—I do have a good backup from where all those came from and wouldn’t take long to rebuild that.

I let run and went pretty smoothly. However, I guess one oversight was that again, even with professionals, you should be very careful with an application like this. It broke my FTP client, and badly. I finally deleted my whole preferences from the application, and poof, it was fixed. As since my FTP application changes settings often, I had to redo these. Was just a lesson to me that you should never trust an application such as this 100%, even if you are skilled. Everything else seemed to be okay, but again, you really need to be careful.

Besides the ‘don’t do system files’ option, there is no level of safety in this application. What would have been nice to have the ability to remove all the duplicate copies and empty files into a zip file which in an amount of time indicated by you to ask if you’d like to delete the compressed file. Also make a feature that this application will recover part or all of the files itself if per chance something did go wrong.

Now, if only Windows properly supported symlinking that some of the issues I ran into could have been avoided.

Final Verdict

While early in its development, this application does show promise. While it is still very unsafe, most ‘scrubbing’ applications are as such. As long as you know what you’re doing, make a backup and have a need to scrub your drives, this is a pretty decent application for free. For $29.95 however, it may be hard to justify this price, without any true protection from error.

Posted by BladedThoth on Sunday, April 01, 2007