Twins is a great application that will hunt down and destroy all duplicate files. This program is especially useful if you have had to migrate between hard drives or simply haven’t taken the time to clean your files out. Over the years, your Mac can accumulate a lot of files, and there is a good chance that some of them might be duplicates. This app will win back your precious hard drive space and keep your file system much more organized.

What is it and what does it do

Twins uses the aid of complicated algorithms to match a file’s contents with other files on your hard drive. It is essentially a finger print scanner for your files that will display all of the matches that it finds.

Pros

• Uses SHA- 1 Checksum to scan files
• Can Automatically delete duplicate files
• Scans multiple locations at once with the ability to exclude certain folders
• Customizable search terms
• Can skip small files and check large files in a background process
• Automator support!

Cons

• Unable to create aliases instead of deletion
• No ignore list
• Doesn’t always pick up every single duplicate
• Unable to select multiple folders in different locations

Discussion

Twins is so successful because of the terrific search algorithms it uses. Twins doesn’t just look at the name of the file when scanning, but instead looks at the contents of the file. This will produce a list of files that really are duplicates, not just named similarly. In addition, you can modify these algorithms to search for something specific. For example, you can specify a specific file size or name in your search if you want, giving you more accurate results. This feature is absolutely necessary because each type of file can have different characteristics.

Twins also does a fantastic job of controlling the location of your searches. For example, you can pick a very large folder, like your main user folder. You can then select folders that you don’t want to be included in the search. This will Narrow down the list and make the search must faster. However, selecting only one large folder is the only way to scan multiple folders. You cannot select 2 random folders to scan because the moment you select one, the scan immediately begins.

There are some other small features that have helped this application fight its way to the top. It is optimized for Apple’s new retina display and Lion’s full-screen-application mode. In addition,the super fast scan engine will show you a quick preview of the duplicate files so you can easily determine if you want to delete one of them or not. The results are then displayed in real time with options that allow you to sort and filter them. Once you decide to delete some files, it will warn you, and then double check to make sure you have error-free deletion.

Conclusion and download link

Twins is truly a fantastic program and does exactly what it says it does. This program is incredibly useful will undoubtedly free up space on anybody’s hard drive. Knowing that you do indeed have duplicate files will also change your downloading habits and in the long run, make you use less bandwidth. Although this app does have some drawbacks, the developer has actually agreed to fix most them.

Price: $2.99

Version reviewed: 1.3

Supported OS: OS X 10.7 or later, 64-bit processor

Download size: 3mb

Twins homepage