# Taking too long to list folders just to find and restore a handful of files

**URL:** <https://forum.duplicati.com/t/taking-too-long-to-list-folders-just-to-find-and-restore-a-handful-of-files/19538>\
**Category:** Support\
**Created:** [November 20, 2024, 9:25am UTC](https://forum.duplicati.com/t/taking-too-long-to-list-folders-just-to-find-and-restore-a-handful-of-files/19538 "2024-11-20T09:25:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Sarah03](https://forum.duplicati.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/54ee81/32.png) [@Sarah03](https://forum.duplicati.com/u/Sarah03)\
**Post date:** [April 24, 2026, 6:39am UTC](https://forum.duplicati.com/t/taking-too-long-to-list-folders-just-to-find-and-restore-a-handful-of-files/19538/21 "2026-04-24T06:39:37Z")

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Hey! I’ve run into this too - it feels like the database overhead can really crawl when you’re just trying to pick out a few specific items from a massive backup set. One thing that helped me was optimizing the local database, but if you’re just trying to parse a huge list of paths or filenames to see what’s actually there, sometimes it’s faster to export the list to text.

If you end up with a messy list of file paths and need to clean out the duplicates quickly to see what you’re working with, I’ve been using [this list cleanup tool](https://www.thetoolapp.com/unique-list-items/) lately. It’s way faster than waiting for the UI to refresh when you just need a clean list of unique items to cross-reference.

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