Keeping your hard drive clean can feel like an uphill struggle as it fills up with detritus. Weeding through your files by hand is a painstaking task, and this is where a search-and-delete tool like Czkawka comes riding to the rescue.
Czkawka can do so much more than find duplicated files. It can also track down similar images and videos, music duplicates, broken files (and symlinks), empty files and folders, and more. It’s written in Rust, uses caches to speed up follow-up scans, and is available both via the Linux desktop and as a CLI application.
Gettingt started
Czkawka can be installed in various ways: via snap, Flatpak (https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.qarmin.czkawka) or you can download the AppImage (https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka/releases). If you install it through snap, you’ll need to give Czkawka access to all your drives:
If you plan to use Czkawka’s Similar Videos tool, you’ll also need ffmpeg. If you get a warning when you attempt to use the tool, simply install it thus:
You’ll also need to install an ALSA lib package to include music files in the Broken Files Finder search. On Ubuntu, use the following command to install the missing package:
Start your searches
If installed through , launch via the application launcher. As the annotation () reveals, it’s split into
