Easiest way to compare two folders?

Crestfallen

Crestfallen

Crestfallen

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Joined
3 Jul 2004
Posts
188
Location
Brighton
Hi all,

Doing some PC housekeeping and I want to tidy things up....

Over the past few years I have slowly ripped all my vinyl and CD's on to my hard-drive. When I first started I copied it's contents onto an identical folder on my network-drive as a backup/music server. Every time I've added new files to one folder I also added them to the other (or so I thought).

They are now slightly out of synch and I want to know what the differences are. One has 14,705 files in 2,356 subfolders (Artist/Album etc) and the other has 14,345 in 2,357 subfolders. Checking this manually is not going to happen. Is there an easy way to compare the two and get a report of the differences?

I stress the word easy; I was copying the files manually as I am too non-technical/lazy to set up an xcopy script (looked into it, never really worked it out). So you can see what sort of idiot you are dealing with. :(

I'm on Win7 if it makes a difference.

Cheers.
 
If you just want to synchronise the folders, just copy one folder to the other and vice versa. Use some common sense when Windows asks what you want to do with files of the same name.
 
Thanks both for the replys. I think I'll give winmerge a shot.

@ Tomsk : You're absolutely right, I didn't think of that, and it would be the sensible way to do it. We are talking about over 90Gb of files though (each), my NAS is Slooooow. And tbh, I'd rather see a diff report before copying one over the other, and inevitably pressing the 'Skip All' button.

Cheers.

Thanks for the help.
 
Crestfallen said:
We are talking about over 90Gb of files though (each), my NAS is Slooooow. And tbh, I'd rather see a diff report before copying one over the other, and inevitably pressing the 'Skip All' button.
Click to expand...
You could try FreeFileSync, and either use the "Automatic" synchronisation setting, or set up a custom rule so that unique files in the "left" folder are copied to the "right", *and* vice versa (don't use "mirror", as that would delete files in the "right" folder if they didn't exist in the "left").

The "compare" operation will show you the differences between the folders before you hit the "synchronise" button, as well as showing you what will happen when the sync takes place - you can override it on a file-by-file basis if you want, although it's unlikely you'd need to. :)
 
I use a small program called DoubleKiller, it shows you files that are identical even if their filenames aren't necessarily the same. Probably not quite what you're looking for though.
 
CaptainCrash said:
You could try FreeFileSync, and either use the "Automatic" synchronisation setting, or set up a custom rule so that unique files in the "left" folder are copied to the "right", *and* vice versa (don't use "mirror", as that would delete files in the "right" folder if they didn't exist in the "left").

The "compare" operation will show you the differences between the folders before you hit the "synchronise" button, as well as showing you what will happen when the sync takes place - you can override it on a file-by-file basis if you want, although it's unlikely you'd need to. :)
Click to expand...

Fantastic, this looks like exactly what I wanted; similar to winmerge, but with a big friendly UI for idiots like me. Plus, it looks like development on winmerge got abandoned two years ago. I'll give this a shot when I get home from work.

Cheers.
 
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