Important Note

CloneSpy

Important Note
CloneSpy builds a list of all files in the selected drives and folders. For this reason, it is important that you do not run any applications which alter the files being searched for duplicates. This includes such operations as saving or deleting files, deleting whole directories or folders, and defragmenting drives. Doing this is not dangerous, but CloneSpy may display files which were duplicates at the time they were analyzed, but which have changed since. Use CloneSpy in the same way that you would use any defragmenting program. It is also recommended that you disable any virus scanner before running the program.

CloneSpy generates 256-bit checksums to compare files if they have the same size. Theoretically this means that different files might get the same checksum. As a result two different files might be wrongly detected as being equal. But this is highly unlikely. In detail the chances that for two different files the same checksums are generated is lower than:

  1 : 100.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000

Note that checksums are only compared if the corresponding files have the same size. In practical dimensions this means that false detections due to so-called checksum collisions never happen.