While it's running

Step 4 of the wizard — "Step 4 of 4 · Scanning your selected locations." This page covers what the numbers mean, why the estimate moves, and what you keep if you stop.

You can stop at any point. The sub-line under the progress bar says so from the first second: "starting · cancellable at any time".

What you're looking at

A large running count of files scanned sits at the top, with a phase chip above it naming what is happening right now: DISCOVERY, then STEP 1 · FAST CHECK, STEP 2 · CLOSER CHECK, STEP 3 · FULL CHECK, then GROUPING MATCHES and COMPLETE. Which steps appear depends on the thoroughness you picked — see How thorough.

Under it, four numbers:
Files scanned Everything found so far
Folders Folders visited
Eliminated Ruled out — nothing else on disk is the same size
Possible duplicates Still in contention

Eliminated climbing fast is normal and good. Most files are dismissed on size alone, without ever being opened.

A card per step fills in beside them — NAME & SIZE, FAST CHECK, CLOSER CHECK, FULL CHECK — each showing how many files it took in and how many it passed on. A step that isn't part of this scan reads "not in this scan" rather than disappearing. If you included similar items, four more tiles track those through Queued and Scanning…, or sit at — Not included or Unavailable. A tile that is queued or scanning shows how many files that check has to look at, so you can see the size of each job before it starts.

The progress bar and the estimate

While Trawler is still finding files it cannot know how many there are, so the bar just moves. Once a checking step starts it knows how much it has to read, and the bar becomes a real percentage with an "NN% complete" caption.

The footer estimate goes "Calculating estimate…" → "Est. remaining about 4 min · this phase" → "Almost done…" under five seconds → "Done".

Read the words "this phase". That estimate is for the step currently running, not for the whole scan. When a step finishes, the next one starts and the estimate resets — that is not a stall or a mistake, it is a new measurement of different work.

After the last check

There is a window at the end where the file counter stops but the app is still working. The bars are replaced by a spinner and a FINALISING line naming what it is doing — finalising duplicate groups, auto-marking, preparing results — with a running count.

On a very large scan this can run for minutes. It is not frozen. The line changes as it moves.

Then the phase chip turns green and reads COMPLETE, and after a moment the wizard moves to the summary.

Cancelling

Cancel scan stops the run. The button changes to "Cancelling…" and stops accepting clicks while it unwinds — the request has been taken, it just isn't instant. You land back on the How thorough? step, ready to change something and run again.

What you keep
Duplicate results None. A cancelled run produces no groups at all — not a partial list.
The work already done Kept. Files Trawler has already read stay read. Running again picks up from there rather than starting over.
Your ticks Untouched. Marks you made are never cleared by a cancel.
Your files Untouched. A scan never writes to them.

The second row is the one that matters: cancelling a long run to add another drive and starting again does not mean paying for the same reading twice. At most a few seconds of in-flight work is lost.

Walking away from it

The scan keeps going if you move off the Run step — coming back returns you to the live view, not to a restarted scan. The rail down the left stays usable throughout, so you can look at Settings or Restore while it works.

Only one job runs at a time. Starting a second scan is refused with "A scan is already running — wait for it to finish or cancel it first."

To be told when it finishes, Settings → Notifications has Notify when a task finishes, plus a minimum duration so short scans don't become noise.

When it stops on its own

Files it cannot read do not stop the scan. They are collected in Scan report → Scan errors and have no effect on the results.

Two failures do end the run, and both say what to do:

  • "The drive ran out of space. Free up some space, then try again."
  • "The scan ran out of memory and stopped. Try scanning one folder instead of a whole drive. Or change Session storage to Saved to disk in Settings — that setting needs the full version."

The second is about memory, not disk. Session storage is in Settings → Scanning & performance, and saving to disk is a full-version feature.

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