4 or 6 TB drives are very common these days. Of course that means that they can contain countless data and unfortunately this often also includes duplicate files, empty folders, large but redundant files and other nonsense. Manually sifting through such a disc is very labour-intensive. Unless you use a tool like Czkawka.
Czkawka
Price
For free
Language
English
OS
Windows, macOS, Linux
Website
www.bit.ly/czkawkadup
8 Score 80 
- Pros
- Versatile search functionality
- Fast
- Negatives
- Limited previews
Czkawka is of Polish origin (apparently to be pronounced ch-kuf-ka, meaning “hiccup”) and is being developed as an open source project. You just unpack the zip archive and start the portable app. By the way, there is also a command-line version available, but we will not discuss it further here.
Search functionality
The Czkawka program window consists of two parts. In the top window you enter the search locations. You can choose whether you want subfolders to be searched, whether you want to include or exclude folders and whether you want to limit the search to specific file extensions. The possible search operations are listed in the lower window. In addition to duplicate files, Czkawka can search for empty folders, empty, temporary and large files, invalid files and symbolic links, and similar images and music, among other things.
Some functions offer additional search parameters. For example, when searching for duplicate files, you can specify criteria such as hash (method), name and size, and use a slider to indicate how closely images may resemble each other.
Search results
After pressing a button, Czkawka immediately gets to work and that happens remarkably quickly. Unfortunately, you only get a thumbnail preview for images. With other search types there is no built-in preview, so you have to check yourself whether it concerns, for example, duplicates. Czkawka also has some useful options for the search results. You can select items manually, but there are also selection options such as ‘select all but the oldest or largest’ and ‘invert the selection’. For example, you can immediately delete items from the disk, but also keep one file and create symbolic links from the duplicates to that one file.
Conclusion
Czkawka may be quite unpronounceable, but we are certainly pleased with the functionality of the tool. Not only does the app work impressively fast, the search functionality is not limited to duplicate files, but also supports similar image and music files and also quickly lists all large files. A built-in preview for all kinds of file types would be a welcome addition.
