Step 2

Step 2: Adding folders

Hint: Which folders should I scan?

Before learning how to add folders to the directory list, you should read the following information on which folders to scan - scanning your complete hard disk and carelessly deleting all duplicates will mess up your system!

If you are using the default comparison settings (size and content) you will always find files that are exactly identical in content, so when you delete one of them, you still have a copy left. This is exactly what you want if you're scanning your own file collections, but it can disable your system if you do this to files in your Windows directory: Windows does neither know that there is another copy of its missing file nor where to look for it.
So generally, you should not remove any files that belong to the operating system or to any programs (except if you exactly know what these files are for and you are sure you don't break anything by removing them). You should only delete files you have created or downloaded yourself, e.g. images, music files or text documents.
The best approach to do this is quite simple: Don't scan your Windows and Program Files directories, but scan 'My Documents' or whereever you put your own files. If you have created different folders for different types of files, e.g. a directory for photos and another one for MP3s, it is also wise to scan them separately. This keeps the result list small and speeds up the scan - you won't find a duplicate photo in your MP3 folder anyway.

Specify folders

To specify the folders you want to scan, switch to the Scan Options page. On the left of the page you will find two directory lists titled 'fresh' and 'library' and some buttons below it. Only the upper list is important at the moment as it behaves just like the single list of the free version of DoubleKiller and most other duplicate file finders. To learn about the interaction of both lists, please refer to 'fresh' and 'library'.
You can add as many directories or partitions as you want to and even shared folders of computers of your Network Neighborhood are supported. To add a directory to any of the lists, click the + button below them:

You will be presented a dialog titled add folder:

You may either use the tree view to browse to the folder you want to add or directly type it into the box below. In the box titled scan options for selected directory you can define the directory state and to which list you want to add it. Press RETURN or click OK if you are confident with your selection.

For our example, we will add 'G:\Mp3 & Ogg', without subdirectories (), and 'F:\Sounds' , scanned recursively ().