Your first scan, end to end

What happens between opening Trawler and having a list of duplicates. It is four steps and one button, and none of it touches your files.

A scan only reads. It builds a list of what it found. Deleting, archiving, moving — every one of those is a separate decision you make afterwards, on the results. Nothing is removed because you ran a scan.

1 · Start from Home

Home opens on "What would you like to do?". The Find duplicates card is the way in — choose Continue.

Below it sits Include similar items, with four toggles: Images, Documents, Audio, Video. Those find files that merely resemble each other — a resized image, a re-encoded clip — and they are matched in the same pass as the exact copies. They also take considerably longer. Leave them off for a first run; you can add them later.

2 · The wizard's four steps

The header counts them: "Step 1 of 4" through "Step 4 of 4".

Step What you answer
Where should we look? Which drives and folders to search. Nothing is pre-ticked, so Next stays disabled until you pick at least one.
What kind of files? One filter from the list. A fresh install starts on Common file types.
How thorough? Quick, Balanced or Thorough. Thorough is pre-selected and carries the Recommended badge.
Run The live scan, then the summary.

Each of the first three has its own page here — Where should we look, What kind of files, How thorough — but the defaults are reasonable, and picking a location and pressing on is a perfectly good first run.

On the How thorough? step, choose Run scan.

3 · While it runs

A card per checking step fills in left to right, with a running file count and an estimate. You can stop at any moment — the sub-line says so: "starting · cancellable at any time".

Details, including what a cancel costs you, are on While it's running.

4 · The result screen

The run ends on a summary with three figures — GROUPS, DUPLICATE FILES and FILES SCANNED — a headline saying "You can reclaim …", and two ways on:

  • View in workbench takes you to the full result list, where you choose what to remove.
  • Archive duplicates · goes straight to processing with the automatic picks. The note under it is accurate: "Archive moves files into a single recoverable ZIP. Nothing is deleted."

If you included similar items, a REVIEW BY CATEGORY section lists each category that found something, and each row jumps to that tab.

Coming back to the results later

The result list is also reachable from Duplicates in the navigation rail at any time.

The scan's settings are saved for you the moment the run starts, so re-running the same scan later does not mean setting it up again.

What the free version does

You can scan and see everything the totals say. What is limited is detail and action:

  • The Duplicates list is browsable for 10 groups. Above that a line tells you how many more there are — the counts and reclaimable totals themselves are never capped.
  • Network locations can't be scanned. Local drives can, whole — the free version just keeps the results in memory, so a very large one can stop before it finishes. Trawler says so when you tick it.

See Free and Pro for the full split.

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