Upgrading from SpaceMan 99 v4 to v5
SpaceMan 99 v5 has been rewritten from the ground up, with a new window. The ideas you know from v4 are still at its heart: you tick folders in the folder tree to scan them, mark the files you want to remove, review them, and delete the marked files together. What has changed is where things are, and some of the details. This page is a map from the old program to the new one.
Your free upgrade
If you bought a license for SpaceMan 99 v4 or earlier, your Pro license for v5 is free. v5 is activated with a token, which starts with T-, rather than the license name and serial number that v4 used.
To get your token, enter the email address you bought your license with on your licenses page. We will email you a link to the page, where your v5 token is shown with your original license. It is for the same number of licenses as your original one.
Site and worldwide licenses are upgraded by hand: please contact [email protected].
Where things are now
| In v4 | In v5 |
|---|---|
| Folder sizes in square brackets before each folder's name | Sizes after the name, with a bar showing each folder's share of the folder above it. See Folder Tree. |
| The File Browser | The Folder Contents tab. |
| The Duplicates List and Duplicate Files panes | The Duplicates tab: each group expands to show its copies. |
| Mark Duplicate Files... (F9) | The Bulk Mark Duplicates panel on the Duplicates tab, and the right-click menus of groups and copies. |
| Mark (F8), Unmark (Shift+F8) | The checkbox beside every file, and Mark Selected / Ctrl+M. |
| View Marked Files... | The Marked tab. |
| Delete Marked Files (Ctrl+D) | Delete Marked... on the Marked tab. |
| The File Delete Option dialog | The Delete using the Windows Recycle Bin option, in the confirmation for every delete. |
| Report... | Reports on the toolbar, which opens the Reports window. |
| Clear All Data, Clear Folder Data, Refresh | Rescan, on a folder's right-click menu and on the Folder Contents tab. To drop a folder from the scan, untick it. |
| Omit empty files, Omit < size | Empty files are always left out of the duplicate search; a minimum size is in the Duplicates tab's Filter. |
| Filter Files... | The nearest equivalent is the Duplicates tab's Filter, which chooses the kinds of file the duplicate search compares. It does not hide files from the lists. |
| Show Size As | Show sizes in, in Settings. |
| Next Duplicate (F10), Previous Duplicate (Shift+F10) | Next duplicate and Previous duplicate on a file's right-click menu. |
| The Current Folder box | The path bar at the top of the window. |
| Protect system files from deletion | Protected folders, which now cover program folders as well as Windows, and ask for your confirmation rather than refusing. |
What works differently
Duplicates are always found by their contents. In v5, there are no Name Only, Size Only or Checksum & Size modes, and no Match Filename or Match Date options: two files are duplicates only if their contents are identical. See Duplicate Groups. SpaceMan 99 also remembers what it has worked out about your files, so a second search over the same files is much quicker than the first.
Keep the newest and Keep the oldest work on every group. In v4 they marked files inside the selected folder. In v5 they keep one copy in every duplicate group, wherever it is. The two folder rules, Clear duplicates out of this folder and Keep this folder's copies, use the selected folder as v4's inside and outside modes did.
Nothing is deleted without the confirmation. The Delete key no longer deletes anything: on the Marked tab it unmarks. Every delete goes through the Marked tab and a confirmation, which asks about the Recycle Bin each time.
Opening a folder never starts a scan. The Open in SpaceMan 99 command
in File Explorer, and a folder given on the command line, select the folder
only; tick it to scan it. The /s option, and holding Ctrl while choosing
the Explorer command, are gone.
Online-only files are never downloaded. In v4, there was an option to allow reading OneDrive files. SpaceMan 99 now never reads an online-only file, so it never causes a download. See Online-only files.
New in v5
- The Overview tab: the scan summary, and the duplicate groups that would free the most space.
- The Largest Files tab.
- Reports that can be saved to a file, as a web page, text, Markdown, CSV, TSV, JSON, JSON Lines or XML, and a Largest Files report.
- Scanning network locations, with a Pro license.
- A light and a dark look, following your Windows setting.
No longer in v5
- Duplicate folders, and the Duplicate Folders report.
- Delete Empty Folders. ExtraBit's DeleteEmptyFolders adds a Delete Empty Folders command to File Explorer's right-click menu.
- Moving and copying files by drag and drop.
- Choosing which columns the lists show.
- The beep or flash when a scan finishes.
- The list of recent folders in the Current Folder box.
- Languages other than English.
Everything else is in the SpaceMan 99 User Guide.
Staying with v4
v5 needs 64-bit Windows 11 or 10, and is currently in English only. If you use SpaceMan 99 on a version of Windows before Windows 10, on 32-bit Windows, or in a language other than English, or you rely on something that is no longer in v5, you can carry on using v4. Your v4 license name and serial number still work with it.
SpaceMan 99 v4.7 is still available to download from your licenses page, with your v4 license.