The problem everyone has and nobody solves
You open a client folder and there they are: Contract.docx, Contract final.docx, Contract final (1).docx, and a PDF somebody exported at some point. None of them match, so duplicate finders see nothing unusual. To them these are four different files. To you they are the same document four times, and you have to open them one by one to find out which is the good one.
That waste of time is so common it stopped looking like a problem. People just live with it. We thought it deserved a tool.
The decision that shaped everything: nothing leaves your computer
The easy path would have been to upload the documents to a server, compare them there and send back the result. That is what almost everything does. But the people who suffer this problem most are exactly the ones who cannot do that: lawyers, accountants, anyone handling other people’s files.
For them privacy is not a preference, it is an obligation. So the rule was simple: there is no server. Not one that promises not to look, but none at all. If there is nowhere to send your files, there is nothing to promise. Everything else was designed under that constraint.
Why it never deletes anything
The obvious way to “clean up” duplicates is to delete them. We ruled that out from the start.
A program that decides for you which version is redundant takes away something unrecoverable the day it gets it wrong. So SimilDoc does not know how to delete: it only copies or moves. If a name is taken, it adds a “(2)” instead of replacing the file. On your first run you can use Copy, and your originals never even notice.
Why we tell you it is not perfect
Comparing the content of two documents and deciding whether they are the same is a statistical call. It gets it right most of the time, but not always, and it would be easy to leave that out.
We prefer the opposite: we show you how similar each file is, we let you raise or lower how strict the grouping should be, and nothing moves until you approve it. What we do guarantee is what can honestly be guaranteed: your files are still there, untouched.
Why it is free, and why the license forbids selling it
There are no servers to pay for, so there is no reason to charge you a subscription for something running on your own computer. It is free for personal use and for nonprofits.
The license does draw one line: nobody can take SimilDoc and make a business out of it. If a company needs it for their work, we talk and we agree on terms. That seems a fair deal in both directions.
Where we are now
SimilDoc reads PDF, Word, TXT and Markdown. Next on the list is reading scanned documents, which is what people living among digitized paperwork miss the most.
If you use it and something gets in your way, or something was grouped wrong, tell us. It is a small tool made with care, and that is how we want to keep it.