Advanced Options

Duplicate File Detective offers an array of advanced options that affect disk I/O priority, thread allocation for file content hashing, and much more.

Thread allocation is the biggest lever. Folder discovery and file content hashing can run single-threaded to keep disk load to an absolute minimum, adapt automatically based on an analysis of your project and system (the default, and the right answer for most people), or be pinned to a specific thread count between 2 and 99. Multiple hashing threads pay off most when a project spans several discrete volumes - multiple physical disks or multiple network paths - where there are genuinely independent I/O queues to keep busy.

Scanning a busy file server during working hours? Switch on low-priority disk I/O and the operating system will let other applications' requests jump ahead of Duplicate File Detective's, so a large duplicate search can grind away in the background without making the machine feel sluggish. Retrieval of file ownership information can be suppressed to speed up scans of remote paths where it isn't needed, and NTFS hard link tracking can be enabled so that several hard links pointing at the same physical data are never reported as duplicates of one another.

Beyond performance, the advanced options tune the details that matter on real systems: relocate the temp folder onto your fastest local SSD, cap the size of files the preview pane will attempt to open, enable Unicode support when creating zip archives, apply NTFS compression to HTML, CSV, and XML export files, tag the shell shortcuts created by duplicate file linking with an identifying comment, and have missing image, music, and document metadata fetched on demand as you select duplicate groups in the report.