Why is Defender scanning a whole lot more files than usual?

I have a quick scan going on right now. It's been about twenty minutes and it's still scanning and it's almost at five million files right now. What's happening? Is this a normal quick scan? Or is it actually doing a full scan instead? 2004.

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I just feel like cancelling the whole thing.

Sounds like a Full Scan.

The last Quick Scan than ran on my system took 4 minutes and scanned 64,913 files.

If you navigate to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Security > Virus & threat protection it will tell you at the top of the window what the last scan was.

Just let it run, and continue using your computer.

OldNavyGuy said:

Sounds like a Full Scan.

The last Quick Scan than ran on my system took 4 minutes and scanned 64,913 files.

Just let it run, and continue using your computer.

Any idea on why this might be happening? And how long can this possibly take?

It's finished. It said that it only scanned 37,313 files. Even though I cancelled it before and just restarted it again. And it only took two minutes. Any idea?

See my updated post.

Once you find out what type of scan it was, you can troubleshoot further.

OldNavyGuy said:

See my updated post.

Once you find out what type of scan it was, you can troubleshoot further.

Okay. And I just edited my post too. Saying that it just finished scanning. I wonder why it scanned like four or five million files taking a half hour but then just saying that it scanned 37,313 files and only took two minutes. That was weird.

Yeah, I don't know where you saw a count of "5 million".

I'm running a Quick Scan now and it's giving me the file count it's scanned so far.

And done...

OldNavyGuy said:

Yeah, I don't know where you saw a count of "5 million".

I'm running a Quick Scan now and it's giving me the file count it's scanned so far.

It show it for me when it was scanning, wish that I would've taken a screenshot then. But maybe, it was a glitch of some kind? I can try again to see if it does the same thing. Would that be a good idea?

Go for it.

OldNavyGuy said:

Go for it.

It's done. Within 50 seconds and only scanned 18,000 files.