I also noticed that it gets stuck at 22,173,422 files

Allow me to explain why there are so many files. I had a drive that needed to be recovered. The file structure was lost and while the files were saved, the directory was not. So I have one drive full of files. I am comparing a drive with a fresh, clean, empty windows 11 install against my drive of recovered files in-order to isolate just the user files that I need saved. But after 1 hour of letting it scan, it got stuck.

On Windows, running task manager while moving duplicate files I noticed a lot of disk usage and just moving 2 files with a total of 6GB took multiple minutes.

This would indicate that when moving a file, instead of simply updating the path where it is located, the old file is actually read into memory and written to a new file. Looking at the creation and last modified date of the moved file confirms that theory.

I'm not sure what the reason for this approach is, as unless one is moving files across disks/shares, simply updating the path the file is located at is faster many times over.

This gets especially bad in the case where one has a small number of large files. Let's say a movie collection where each files is a few GBs. If we say we e.g. have 100 files with 1GB each, "moving" the files by writing them from scratch (which is what czkawka currently does on Windows v5.0.2) would on a conventional harddisk with 160MB/s write speed take around 10 minutes to complete. Moving the file by just updating the path for comparison would take around 2-3 seconds. That's a 300x difference!

Now I'm pretty sure there is some reason that moving files is done in the way it is in czkawka so I'm curious what the reason is ^^