Czkawka
135 likes
Czkawka is a simple, fast, written in Rust and easy to use app to remove unnecessary files from your computer.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Application types
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Flathub
- Snapcraft
Features
Properties
- Lightweight
Features
- Duplicate File Finder
- Image Preview
- Fast file and folder search
- Dark Mode
- Graphical User Interface
- Multi Folders Selection
- Rust
- Command line interface
- Ad-free
- Works Offline
- No Tracking
- No registration required
- Portable
Tags
- duplicate-files
- support-for-large-file
- empty-folders-finder
- duplicates
Czkawka News & Activities
Highlights All activities
Recent News
- POX published news article about Czkawka
Czkawka 10.0 released with improved performance, reproducible binaries, and much moreCzkawka 10.0 is now available, offering improvements to this free and open source solution for remo...
- POX published news article about Czkawka
Czkawka 9.0 brings faster duplicate file search and many other performance improvementsCzkawka, a free application designed to efficiently remove unnecessary files from computers, has la...
- POX published news article about Czkawka
Czkawka 7.0 unveils new 'Krokiet' GUI, performance improvements, and moreCzkawka, the widely used application for discovering duplicate files, empty folders, and similar im...
Recent activities
- sebastianpaczoski updated Czkawka
TheEmperorArt added Czkawka as alternative to Glary Duplicate Cleaner
TheEmperorArt added Czkawka as alternative to Nero DuplicateManager- TheEmperorArt added Czkawka as alternative to Aomei Partition Assistant for Cleanup
TheEmperorArt added Czkawka as alternative to EaseUS DupFiles Cleaner
TheEmperorArt added Czkawka as alternative to iBeesoft Duplicate Finder
TheEmperorArt added Czkawka as alternative to Ashampoo Duplicate File Finder
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What is Czkawka?
Czkawka is a simple, fast, written in Rust and easy to use app to remove unnecessary files from your computer.
Features:
- Written in memory safe Rust
- Amazingly fast - due using more or less advanced algorithms and multithreading support
- Free, Open Source without ads
- Multiplatform - works on Linux, Windows and macOS
- Cache support - second and further scans should be a lot faster than the first one
- CLI frontend, very fast and powerful with rich help
- GUI GTK frontend - uses GTK 4 framework and looks similar to FSlint
- Rich search option - allows setting absolute included and excluded directories, set of allowed file extensions or excluded items with * wildcard
- No spying - Czkawka does not have access to the Internet, nor does it collect any user information or statistics
- Multiple tools to use:
- Duplicates - Finds duplicates basing on size(fast), hash(accurate), first 1MB of hash(moderate)
- Empty Folders - Finds empty folders with the help of advanced algorithm
- Big Files - Finds provided number of the biggest files in given location
- Empty Files - Looks for empty files across disk
- Temporary Files - Allows finding temporary files
- Similar Images - Finds images which are not exactly the same(different resolution, watermarks)
- Zeroed Files - Find files which are filled with zeros(usually corrupted)
- Same Music - Search for music with same artist, album etc.
- Invalid Symbolic Links - Shows symbolic links which point to non-existent files/directories
- Broken Files - Finds files with an invalid extension or that are corrupted
- Bad Extensions - Lists files whose content not match with their extension









Comments and Reviews
Linux first, but also supports Windows. Regularly updated - unlike most software in this category.
Not great. In my first attempt to use it I found (and reported) two serious bugs. One is that the app often incorrectly identifies a unique file as a duplicate by showing two entries for the same file path. If you select either entries your file is gone for good. Since I'm scanning a few terabytes of files, I can't afford to check every buggy entry.
The other bug regards the symbolic link feature. As of version 6.1.0 (on Windows) It never creates the symbolic links, it just deletes the file. If you run this over a few terabytes of data you're sure going to fuck your data up.
At this rate, it's unusable.
Frankly, the app doesn't leave a good first impression, but its second impression is remarkable. I let it loose on 15,000 on a 150 GB disk. Czakwka completed its job in 13 minutes. In comparison, Wise Duplicate Finder didn't finish overnight.
Performance aside, this app could use a much better UI.
Questionable installs, bad user interface, and warnings about disappearing files from reviewer(s). I gave it a quick look, but decided to not try a file search. "Best" download I found was from Softpedia. MajorGeeks & Sourceforge install wouldn't work. Run by clicking czkawka_gui.exe. UI is a turnoff.. darkmode with barely visible text.. no setting to change this
Windows GTK version has Trojan inside. Don’t use it. Not only version 7.0, but also previous versions. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/82a886eeb7b4bb0bcf56b218e0a65093b65d9ed4656bc6fe62662b6380a0a806
That "trojan" is only 1/65 anti-malware vendors, and an unknown one at that - most software reviews I've read put that kind of ratio as a "false positive". Good that people are checking! But also important to not give too much weight to one, two, or even three bad results from minor companies. Seen a few come and go from VT.
Tricky to install, as is everything in Github unless you know where to look. GUI uses teeny tiny font which is difficult to read. Doesn't seem to include subfolders and I can't find an option to include subfolders. So pretty useless to me, I'm afraid.
A lot of your critique is still pretty valid, especially the tiny font, and not knowing which Github install to download.
A fix for the tiny font can be found here: https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka/issues/787 and here: https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka/issues/993#issuecomment-1586164746
Funny name but it really does the job! Also it's available as app image.
Awesome program and easy to understand!
Just dragging folders on it doesn't work (tried also adding folders per CLI, also failed).