Help / Your library
Quarantine: how removed copies are kept, restored and purged
When you clear out duplicate copies, Vesari Stylus never deletes them. Each one goes into a holding area called quarantine, inside your own music folder, where it stays untouched until you put it back or clear it out for good.
Think of it as a recycle bin that lives with your music rather than the app, which matters most on a network drive, where Windows offers none. Everything moved in one cleanup forms a batch, and the batch is what you restore or delete later.
Where the quarantined files go
Quarantined files stay on the same drive as the music they came from. Inside the music folder you added, the app creates .aj-quarantine, then a folder for the batch, then the folder path the file already had.
A track at:
D:\Music\Rock\Loveless\01 Only Shallow.flac
lands at:
D:\Music\.aj-quarantine\<batch>\Rock\Loveless\01 Only Shallow.flac
Because the move stays on one volume it is a rename, not a copy, so even a large cleanup over a NAS is quick and never rewrites your audio. Library scans and the folder watcher both skip .aj-quarantine, so quarantined files are never re-indexed or flagged as duplicates again.
What moves and what stays
The copy you keep is not touched. The file move happens first, so if it fails, because the file is open or the share is read-only, the copy, its library entry and its history are left as they were. Once the move succeeds, the removed copy's play history, star rating and playlist places are merged onto the copy you kept, so no listening data is lost.
Sending copies to quarantine
This is the last step of the duplicate review in Library Health & finding duplicates. The window carries a beta label, and a banner under the title repeats that copies are moved to quarantine rather than deleted.
- Open Library Health and find the Duplicate tracks card.
- Press Review duplicates.
- Nothing is ticked for you, so tick only the copies you want moved. The copy marked KEEP is the one the app picked, ranked on channel count first, then bit depth, sample rate and whether the format is lossless. A group can hold more than one keeper, so read the specs under each name first. Select all shown ticks every removable copy on screen if you prefer bulk.
- Press Move N copies to quarantine, then confirm with Move to quarantine.
The window closes and the batch runs in the background, with a progress strip you can Cancel at any point. Cancelling stops after the file in flight, and everything already moved stays in quarantine, restorable. If the library is still analysing, applying is paused until it finishes.
Flagging duplicates and browsing them is free for everyone. Moving copies to quarantine is one of the paid library tools: a trial can move up to 250 copies in total, and Pro and Lifetime are uncapped.
Restoring a batch
Open the same window and switch to the Quarantine tab. Each batch shows how many copies it holds, how much space they take and when they moved.
Press Restore and every file in that batch goes back to the path it came from, then is re-indexed into your library. If something else has since taken that path, the file lands beside it with (restored) added to the name rather than overwriting anything. The history merged onto the copy you kept stays there, so a restore hands the file back without unpicking your stats.
Restore works a whole batch at a time. To bring back a single file, move it yourself: I moved duplicates to quarantine and cannot find the files shows how.
Purging for good
Press Purge on a batch and confirm Delete permanently. This is the only step in the cleanup that deletes anything, and on a network share with no recycle bin it cannot be undone.
Purge with the drive or share connected. If a file is locked, because it is playing or another program has it open, the batch stays on the list rather than quietly disappearing, so you can close whatever holds it and try again. If the drive is unreachable, the batch is cleared from the list even though the files are still sitting in .aj-quarantine, which you would then have to remove by hand.
What survives what
Quarantined audio lives in your music folder, not in the app's own data folder, so reinstalling Vesari Stylus leaves it alone. The list of batches lives with your library data. If that data is ever cleared, the audio is still in .aj-quarantine, and because the layout mirrors your original folders you can move it back by hand.
Copies the cleanup leaves alone
A flagged copy is sometimes left alone on purpose: the kept copy may not be a close enough match, the copy may be one track inside a CUE sheet rather than a standalone file, or its identity may still be settling. Why do I see two different "duplicate" numbers? covers that. One more case is a filename that is legal on a NAS but not on Windows, such as one with a colon or ending in a dot. Those can be neither moved nor restored, so the app skips them whole and tells you why.
If a cleanup reports failures you cannot explain, use the in-app option to report a problem and quote what it said. See Is this a bug? How to report it.