Hi! Recently I’ve been feeling the need to consolidate all the data between my NAS and various hard drives I’ve been piling up as cold storage. Unfortunately I’ve not been diligent enough in making new backups keeping the same folder structure, beside the first two layers.
So now I’ve been slowly and patiently moving back to my NAS each copy to compare it to the one on the NAS to find if I’m missing files from my NAS. The next step is gonna be to format the cold storage drives and moving back data on them (also gonna compress many files I don’t access often, but that’s beside the point).
Now, comparing folders and files by eye has been stressful and challenging so I took it to Google to find a Windows program that allows me to review a comparison made between folders instead of doing it manually. I’ve not find any software that made me comfortable in handling my data. Not storing anything classified, but I wouldn’t want to lose data or have them sent back to a server somewhere in the world.
Do you have any suggestions on a good, possibly free, solution to do this job that respects my privacy and my files? Thanks a lot!
P.S. I can’t do this through a Linux machine because I only have an 11 years old laptop I could use and it has recently developed the bad habit of crashing under memory intensive workloads. I think the IMC on the CPU is slowly dying.
Yes you can! Just reboot your win-OS machine into a Linux Live-CD and have the power of said machine available under Linux. Of course, a bootable USB would be even better Consider the Sysrescuecd image for that.
I’ve used Beyond Compare (Scooter Software | Home of Beyond Compare) for this purpose before. It’ll help compare directory structures, as well as contents inside text files if you like (similar to Notepad++'s Compare plugin). However it’s been a long time since I’ve used it, and i’m not seeing what the current trial’s limitations are via the site itself.
I’m a code monkey so I use Araxis Merge for this sort of stuff (really good for anything where two things might differ, be those things git conflicts or two folders). It’s not free, nor is it even particularly cheap, but I’m just throwing this out there in case you have similar interests because then it’s worth every penny.
One free solution would be windiff. It used to be part of ancient Windows resource kits and option packs, I first remember seeing it with NT4. I don’t know if you can still get it from Microsoft, but this guy has it on his site:
For something more current, you could check out WinMerge. It’s mostly focused on text files (like the other two previous mentions) but it claims to do folders too. It’s open source and seems well-maintained so this might be your best bet.
@Dutch_Master I wish I could use live CDs again, I would surely trust them a lot more than a USB stick! I usually tend to discard live environments to do critical stuff.
@Molly Looks promising, but the website is very much hard to navigate and it was even harder to find the difference between the versions you can buy!
@martona It’s really interesting just like Beyond Compare, I need to look into both to see which one works better of the two. I guess I could chuck the price of the software into the NAS build cost. I could try WinMerge first and see if it works for me or not. I wouldn’t trust an ancient Microsoft tool, they were hit or miss for me back in the day. Interesting suggestion though!
If you decide to go with Araxis Merge, you may want to tweak the options before using it for folders with large/binary files. I’m pretty sure the detault is to actually do a diff on two binaries if they differ by size or timestamp, and it goes much faster if you have it assume that they are actually different in this case.
As for live CDs, you can make a perfectly usable windows installation that boots from a USB stick. Or a .vhd image on a usb stick, even. If you make a .vhd differencing chain, you can even reset this OS to its default state whenever you want just by copying a few bytes. It’s kind of like a live CD, but better in every aspect.
You could install git and use the git bash shell on that. Works pretty well for most tasks.
Also, powershell is actually way more awesome than people give it credit for, it’s just that the documentation and ecosystem is kind of a dumpster fire.
Seems like BC is gonna be the one I go for. I don’t mind spending some money on good software that will come handy in the future.
Should I go for the Pro version even if I’m not gonna use it for cloud storage?
Personally, I’d go for the Pro. It’s a one time fee, (with no annual renewal which is rare enough today) so it will be there for a long time and if you ever start Cloud stuff, you are set.
I hate paying for a basic license and find restrictions. With the Pro you have everything.
“Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.”
Consider the Sysrescuecd image for that.