Comparing the contents of two large folders.

Windows 10
Suspecting a failed clone, I need to compare the System32 folders of
the original and a cloned copy to see if there's a file missing.
Since there are hundreds of files I need some auto way to do this.
Peter

On Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:05:50 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

Windows 10
Suspecting a failed clone, I need to compare the System32 folders of
the original and a cloned copy to see if there's a file missing.
Since there are hundreds of files I need some auto way to do this.
Peter
FolderMatch from www.foldermatch.com
(About US$25, 7 day trial available)
or Syncovery www.syncovery.com
(about US$35 for Standard Edition, US$60 for Professional Edition)

FolderMatch is easier to use for ad-hoc checks, while
Syncovery is more complete and does compares faster.

The performance differences shouldn't matter for "hundreds of files",
but I switched to Syncovery (under an earlier name) when it became
available since it run much contents comparisons much faster and had
few limitations when comparing clones of complete system
disks.

Peter Jason wrote:
Windows 10
Suspecting a failed clone, I need to compare the System32 folders of
the original and a cloned copy to see if there's a file missing.
Since there are hundreds of files I need some auto way to do this.
Peter

The two utilities I can find in a quick search (Beyond Compare, WinMerge)
aren't really focused on "missing files" all that much.

The WinMerge has a relatively ugly GUI (you have to read the display, you can't
just glance at it and scroll down quickly).

As I always do things differently than everyone else, I would
be using

md5deep -r -z -W F:\Y_md5deep.txt Y:\

In that example, F: is my RAMDisk and "doesn't rattle when you
write to it". The Y: partition was some OS partition I was
looking at. One of the options in md5deep is "recursive", so
it will descend a whole tree. You could for example, specify
Y:\Windows if you just wanted the Windows tree. I use a command
like that, if I want to checksum an entire partition.

Once the "Y_md5deep.txt" file is prepared, you "diff" that
with the "W_md5deep.txt" file you made for the W: drive
with the original OS on it. Packages like this can be used
to diff two output files.

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/diffutils.htm

And that to me, is the hardest part of the problem, finding
a decent "diff" util. Back in my Unix days, I had an excellent
one, that always gave me what I was after. I can't vouch for
the modern ones, as I'm frequently disappointed in the results
(like, not removing duplicate sections from the output when
they're supposed to).

With diff, the basic idea is

diff a.txt b.txt c.txt

and in the c.txt, it is only supposed to list the significant
differences. This requires "synchronization" between the two
text streams, and figuring out which side is missing a chunk.

Anyway, you won't be doing it that way, so there's nothing more
to be said about it. You'll probably search for a GUI utility,
and preferably, one with a GUI that you can glance at as you
scroll down the results.

The purpose of md5deep, is to compute a checksum for each
file, so you can tell if files were changed or copied exactly.

Diffing a tree, after you've run Windows Updates, well, naturally
some number of files will have changed. Similarly, if the folders
have log files (like w32time.log on my current machine), then
those logs will differ between the two disk drives. So the longer
you run a disk since cloning, the more (nuisance) differences
there will be between them.

Paul

In article ,
says...

Windows 10
Suspecting a failed clone, I need to compare the System32 folders of
the original and a cloned copy to see if there's a file missing.
Since there are hundreds of files I need some auto way to do this.
Peter

Freefilesync will compare two folders

Paul wrote on 9/20/2015 12:27 AM:
The two utilities I can find in a quick search (Beyond Compare, WinMerge)
aren't really focused on "missing files" all that much.
I use winmerge. Yes the GUI is ugly but once around the block I find it quite easy to use.
It is two fold, it will compare files or folders. I've never used it though on whole drives or anything that large.
I have some 50K photos in various folders and have used it for that and had no issues.

On Sun, 20 Sep 2015 01:54:16 -0300, pjp wrote:

In article ,
says...

Windows 10 Suspecting a failed clone, I need to compare the System32
folders of the original and a cloned copy to see if there's a file
missing. Since there are hundreds of files I need some auto way to do
this. Peter

Freefilesync will compare two folders

And it's a little better than winmerge. Winmerge used to have a problem
comparing NTFS and FAT32 partitions at switch from daylight saving time
due to different time stamp calculation. They may have fixed it my now.