The scan runs on your computer and reads only. It walks the drive, fingerprints every file by its contents, and builds a catalogue: what is there, how big, how old, what kind of thing it is.
Duplicates are matched on the contents of the whole file — a SHA-256 fingerprint of every byte — never on a name or a size. --verify goes further, re-reading both files and comparing them byte for byte before anything is moved. Hard links are counted as the one file they are, and on filesystems where copies can share storage the report says what is recoverable at most rather than quoting a number it cannot stand behind.
A cleanup moves duplicates into a quarantine folder on the same drive, writing down each move before it happens. Nothing is deleted. One command puts it all back.
--organize is the other half: music filed by album artist and album out of its own tags, photos and videos by the year they were taken — read from the file, HEIC included — everything else by kind and year, and a format whose date this cannot read yet named in the plan rather than filed under a guess.
--music-dedupe finds the same recording held as several encodings, which a fingerprint of the bytes can never match: same artist, same title, same length to within four seconds. It keeps the best — lossless first, then bit depth, bitrate, sample rate, then which file knows more about itself — moves the rest only where something other than a tiebreak decided, and leaves copies it cannot separate alone. Sorting never pulls apart a photo library, an application, a software project or a saved web page.
What it counts
Every function reports what it consumed, and only your plan turns that into money. Drives counts:
- GB scanned — counted, never billed
- drives — a plan limit, never a per-unit charge
- cleanups — a plan limit, never a per-unit charge