Looking for a utility that will compare folders and report which are missing.

General Questions
#1

Win XP, Win 7 are my operating systems

Copied a root folder with about 50 sub folders to another hard drive as a backup. Since then I’ve added more sub folders under the root.

Need a utility that will simply match folders from one location and another. Report whats missing.

In my case it’s folders that I care about. But if the utility works at the file level thats fine too.

I did it the hard way one time by printing off the folder tree from each location. Manually checked off the missing ones with a pencil. I never, ever, ever want to do that again. :smack: Talk about a major PITA. This is why computers were invented.

#2

Winmerge

#3

Syncback can give you a report like that, and then you can give it a “go ahead” to merge A with B or B with A.

#4

Microsoft SyncToy is also a program that will synchronize folders and files between a source and a target, you can get a preview of what it would do

#5

I don’t know about Windows, but in Linux I would just do something like

$ls /path/to/folder1 >somefile
$ls /path/to/folder2 >someotherfile
$diff somefile someotherfile

I’m pretty sure similar commands exist in cmd.exe.

#6

A quick googling shows that you can just replace “ls” with “dir” here and it should work on Windows. “Diff” is apparently not as full featured on Windows as on Unix, but it shouldn’t matter for this application.

#7

Just run “Windiff” and then “Compare directories”.

#8

Back in the Paleocene there was a DOS program called DIRMATCH that did this, for files in two directories. I suppose it would have shown subdirectories too. It was published, for free, in one of the PC hobbyist magazines. It showed side-by-side lists of the two directories, highlighting those with mis-matched timestamps too. It has options to copy individual files from one directory to the other, or to copy ALL the newer files over ALL the older (or missing) ones.

I would guess that it still works in DOS or cmd mode, but only for old-style 8.3 file names. One of the above-mentioned modern programs may well be the updated Winders version of it.