What happens when you scan a drive.
- 01
Pick a source
A local drive, or a saved remote host. Free scans your home drive; Pro opens every local drive on the machine. Remote hosts work on either tier.
- 02
Cloud-sync folders are skipped
OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, Box, pCloud and MEGA are excluded by default — their placeholder files aren't real local bytes, and walking them can make the provider download the real thing. One switch includes them if you want.
- 03
The walk runs, 64 folders at a time
Locally, a concurrent breadth-first walk reads up to 64 directories at once and reports each folder's direct size as it goes, so the running total climbs while the scan is still working. Junctions and symlinks are resolved so nothing is counted twice.
- 04
Nothing is quietly dropped
Files the kernel refuses to open — pagefile.sys and friends — are sized from the directory entry instead, roughly 15 GB most scanners lose on a system drive. Folders that couldn't be read at all are counted and surfaced, with a one-click restart as Administrator.
- 05
Remote hosts take the same path, differently
On a host with a shell, a single `find` command streams type, size and path for the whole tree in one pass. Without one — a locked-down SFTP account, or plain FTP — it falls back to a directory walk over as many parallel connections as that host allows.
- 06
Duplicates get a three-pass check
Files are grouped by exact byte size; unique sizes are dropped immediately. Survivors get a SHA-1 of their first 4 KB. Only what still matches is hashed in full. Remotely, both hash passes run on the host, so hashes cross the wire rather than files.
- 07
You see bars or a donut
The same result renders as a bar chart or a donut of the folder you're standing in — the nine largest children plus an "Other" bucket. Open one and the chart follows you down.
- 08
Clear what you don't need
Multi-select in the Duplicates tab or browse the Files tab directly. At least one copy in every duplicate group is always kept. Local deletions go to the recycle bin; remote deletions are permanent, and the button says so.
No account. No sync. No telemetry.
Scanning never touches the network. Space Wizard makes exactly two outbound calls in its whole life: checking a licence key when you activate one, and checking for a new version once after launch. Both are optional — there is an offline licence file for machines that never go online at all.
Pointing it at production?
Host-key verification, credential storage and exactly what a scan touches — before you connect it to anything that matters.