15-Minute Reviews :: Clone Terminator v1.5

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Clone Terminator version 1.5 by Enplase Research Corporation – An application to help you purge duplicate and empty files.

I have previously reviewed Clone Terminator 1.0. Click here to read the previous review.

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

• Interface is pretty easy to use
• Does find duplicates when they are not the same name
• Does find empty files though sometimes placed them in duplicates
• Decent control over deletion though some reason did not go to Recycle Bin
• Runs fairly quickly depending on file sizes and number of files

Quick Cons

• Would not scan starting from main drive
• One discrepancy where two files labelled same and weren’t
• Delete files button states it deletes to Recycle Bin, but did not
• Still limited protection against deleting critical files

Expansion

I found this application’s interface is relatively easy to use for the most part. A wizard-style interface, it takes you through the steps of picking a location (or multiple locations); Choosing settings such as checking for empty files, excluding system or temp files and limit scanning to specific file sizes; The actual scanning portion and finally the results. I did find that the choice of dialog box was a bit awkward for folder selection, and also would not allow me to browse into remote computers unless a share was already appearing in the My Network Places. When you do hit the results page, the interface isn’t too bad for helping you find the duplicates; It groups all similar files (Not just in pairs) into groups, and alternates the color-coding so that spotting the groupings are fairly easy. You can use the buttons along the bottom of the table to control what happens with the files, or use the right-click menu as well for quicker usage. There are even hotkeys as well which you can find out more on from the right-click menu. On this window, you can also see the created/modified/opened information for each file as you click on it to the left. It would have been nice if this information was included in the table as well, and maybe separated the file name and directory into different columns for more customizability. On this same page is the Empty Files tab, which is the same as the Identical Files tab, except it shows the empty files only.

For the most part, this application does what it is supposed to (save one case; See below). At first I tried to allow the application to scan my entire C: drive but for some reason it wouldn’t recurse outside the C: drive (I would consider this in itself a safety feature). Instead I chose a few folders and areas I knew had duplicates and let it run instead. I did have a pretty good run and it did find a good number of duplicates for me. As mentioned in the previous review however; Make sure you know what you are doing, or you do run the risk of losing some non-system critical files which could break applications as I had last time. The only discrepancy I had this time was that for some reason it marked a PDF and a .tar.gz file (Which I did confirm were a PDF and a .tar.gz with different content) were the same even though only the size was identical.

The empty files functionality does work as well, but again caution should be taken that it isn’t an empty file an application needs. Granted, the application that may need it should be intelligent enough to recreate the file; However I have seen cases in the past where some applications would cease to work or work correctly without one empty file.

One odd bug that I fell into, which was odd in itself, is that the application notes in a few places that all deleted files are sent to the Recycle Bin for safety reasons (A good idea to at least help partially with safety of data and system integrity; I don’t believe this feature existed in the last version). However, upon deleting some duplicates, I went to check my Recycle Bin, to find nothing in it. I checked all of my system settings and I do not have anything that would cause the folder to auto-delete besides a 20 percent limit on the Recycle Bin, and 20 images would not have sent it over the limit (The Recycle Bin was empty beforehand as well). Not sure if this is a bug or something happened on my system, but it defeats the purpose of extra security.

I do mention that this application lacks any additional security against accidental deletions. I would have liked to seen the capability for the application to do some form of backup of the file(s) and then, say in a week, remind you to delete (or ask you and delete it for you) the backup folder or compressed file set. With the potential for decent amount of damage from an application such as this one, it really should have some sort of fail-safe, besides ignoring system files, not scanning the entire drive or sending to Recycle Bin.

Final Verdict

As I mention with any application that alters files significantly (deleting them), caution should always be taken with a tool such as this one and a good backup be taken before starting. As noted above, the application did incorrectly identified one file pair, and if I did not pay attention, I could have lost a potentially-critical file to myself. For free, it isn’t a bad tool and is relatively quick; With its capability of grouping all identical files, you’re not running the risk of deleting all the files with a cyclic deletion. As for paying $29.95 for this title, until its comparing algorithms become more accurate and some form of actual backup besides attempting to place the files in the Recycle Bin, I just can’t recommend it with alternates such as Duplicate File Finder being freeware.

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, October 23, 2007