Ran czkawka_gui_gtk412 aka czkawka for about 5minutes and it found all the duplicates! That’s good. It is using 250megabytes of ram ALSO GOOD. I have no idea how to delete the files I want deleted though.
I mounted all the badly sorted files as L: and the files sorted properly as M: So I want to delete all duplicates in L: buuuuuuut czkawka is not telling me anything about the file path of the duplicates!
OH wait no I figured it out I can do custom select. Path. Set path to L:
Dang that does not work I had to instead set the path to something weird \server\remotename folderonremotename\* … actually I forget, I think I had to also use / instead of \ it makes sense since these tools are mainly for linux but also work on windows so it doesn’t support using drive letters everywhere…. Even though I added the files to scan via drive letter.
There we go! It worked.
I wanted to be sure the file paths were right though so I compared to krokiet which is another gui for czkawka and it does have a file path column so I can recommend to anyone AGAINST dupeguru and FOR czkawka and it’s variants! Whew. Glad to have that 4TB back! I knew I made a mistake but hunting down 20,000 mistakes out of 90,000 files compared to a base of 300,000 files would’ve been impossible to do manually!
Neither krokiet or czkawka_gui_gtk used more than 300megabytes of ram. And that make sense. I set them to NOT make hashes. Why? I knew the hashes would get out of hand. dupeguru must’ve been making hashes by default or something?
EDIT: To clarify krokiet shows the file paths in an easy to read manner and lets you click the GUI to open the file path in file explorer. But krokiet does not have a handy select custom button to customize and select 18000 files all at once. So I guess czkawka_gui_gtk for 20,000 duplicates and krokiet when you suspect merely 100s you can skim through and do a select all of.
Deleting the files still leaves the folders a mess, but I can delete empty folders rather easily I suppose…. At least the empty folders don’t eat 4TB.