Disk Drill vs SquirrelDisk: duplicate finders and disk space tools compared

The short answer

Disk Drill and SquirrelDisk overlap less than their feature lists suggest. Disk Drill is a data recovery app first: its paid version gets back deleted files and damaged drives, and it comes with free extras, including a duplicate finder and a disk cleanup view. SquirrelDisk is a disk space app: it shows what is using your space as a chart, finds duplicates and helps you clean up safely. It is free and open source, and runs on macOS, Windows and Linux.

If you only want to find duplicate photos and videos and free up space, both will do the job. SquirrelDisk can also compare servers and cloud storage, lets rules decide which copy stays, and costs nothing. If you need to recover files, SquirrelDisk can't help, and Disk Drill can.

Disk Drill vs SquirrelDisk

Checked on 18 October 2026 on cleverfiles.com.

Finding duplicates with SquirrelDisk

Open Find duplicates from the home screen and add the places to compare: folders, your startup disk, an external SSD or SD card, a NAS over SSH, or cloud storage through rclone. Copies are found across all of them at once, which is where most duplicates live: the same card imported on your Mac and on a backup drive, or a project folder copied to an external disk.

Files are compared by content, so renamed copies are found too. Results appear while the scan is still running, biggest savings first, with the total space you can get back at the top.

For each set, one copy is kept and the others are checked for removal. "Always keep" rules protect folders such as ~/Pictures or patterns such as **/Archive/**; otherwise the oldest copy, the newest, or the one with the shortest path is kept. Files inside app libraries (Photos, Final Cut Pro and similar) are never removed, because that would break the library.

Before removing anything, SquirrelDisk checks that the copy being kept is still there and that each copy being removed hasn't changed since the scan. Local files go to the Trash unless you choose to delete them permanently.

The blog post about the duplicate finder explains how it works in more detail.

When Disk Drill is the better choice

• You need to recover files. This is what Disk Drill is built for: deleted files, formatted cards, damaged drives. SquirrelDisk has no recovery features.
• You want one app for recovery, backups and disk health. Disk Drill's free tools include S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, byte-to-byte backups and a bootable recovery drive.
• You want a commercial app with support. Disk Drill is backed by a company. SquirrelDisk is an open source project maintained by its original author, and its builds aren't code-signed, so the first launch on a Mac takes an extra step.

SquirrelDisk is the better fit if you want a free, open source tool, if you use Windows or Linux as well as a Mac, or if your duplicates are spread across a NAS or cloud storage.

Without either app

On a Mac, the command line can find duplicates too. This prints every extra copy in a folder (each file whose content matches one listed before it):

find ~/Pictures -type f -size +100k -exec md5 -r {} + | sort | awk '{ if ($1 == prev) print; prev = $1 }'

fdupes and jdupes are free command-line tools for the same job, and dupeGuru is a free app for Mac, Windows and Linux.