Indication of Completion

[tired]

I am very new to Beyond Compare, and I'm using version 2.2.7 on Windows XP.

My question is simple: How can I tell when a comparison process is complete? I know that if I hover the mouse over the main window, it turns into the "working in background" cursor, but I was hoping there was something easier and more reliable to go by.

I'm surprised there is no (optional) "Comparison in progress..." dialog or something. Even appropriate status bar text would help. And even with verbose mode enabled, the log doesn't indicate that a comparison is done.

Am I missing something?

[sakis]

I have to agree with tired. BC definately needs some kind of completion notification. Even a simple "Beep" would be fine.

[tired]

A sound would be cool, but I tend to disable all system sounds. There really needs to be some sort of visual indication, and I thought that since it's such an obvious point, I must be overlooking it.

Then again, even if there is one, if it's that hard to notice, it needs to be improved.

[Ernie]

If you have the standard toolbars and the 'View' toolbar enabled, the 'Cancel' icon on the toolbar will indicate comparison activity.

The 'Cancel' icon is active during the comparison (round red 'X'). The icon becomes inactive when the comparison is complete (becomes a greyed out round 'X').

It is not the most obvious indicator, but provides some information . ;)

[tired]

Yeah, that's right; I've noticed that toolbar button before, but failed to notice it while doing comparisons.

It's little things like this that makes BC too inconvenient for me to continue using.

That, and simply wondering how compares are being done. When I compare two files, is it being done with CRC? Binary? Something else? How can I control this? If I can control it, how can I make folders compared using something else?

I know I have ventured OT, but I don't care, because I'm outta here. Thanks for the input; I do appreciate your help.

[Craig]

Hi Tired,

If you've hung around long enough to see a reply:

If you want a progress indicator you might try using the "Compare Contents" command in the "Actions" menu. It has progress per-file and overall and has radio buttons to control whether the comparison is done using CRCs, binary comparisons, or the textual "rules-based" comparisons. The entire point behind the background comparisons is that you aren't supposed to care when they're done because you can view comparisons, copy files, etc, while they're going on. To actually control what kind of comparison it's doing, select "Comparison Control" from the "Session" menu. There are numerous options there to control how the files are compared. That said, we are definitely going to have progress reporting for the background folder comparison in v3. It's still quite a ways off, but we aren't ignoring that request.

I've hung around long enough. :) BC's FTP capability is what has kept me interested thus far. I find it works much better than that of FTP Voyager, which costs about as much as a private jet. By the way, thank you very much for the reply.

This belongs in a new thread, but since we're already on the topic, I may as well try to get clarification.

I often compare two individual files from an Explorer window. When I do this, I always like to use a full binary comparison mode.

When I compare folders, I like to speed it up and use either CRC, or name/size/date/time, rather than a full binary comparison.

The question: Is there a way I can configure BC so that when I compare files in Explorer (i.e. using the BC shell extension), it does a binary comparison, but when I compare folders, it automatically does a CRC comparison instead?

[tired]

Oops, forgot to log in.

[Craig]

The question: Is there a way I can configure BC so that when I compare files in Explorer (i.e. using the BC shell extension), it does a binary comparison, but when I compare folders, it automatically does a CRC comparison instead?



Yep. :) To control what type of file comparison is initially done from Explorer go into the "Options" dialog, and in the "Startup" section there's an option to control whether it does a binary or rules-based comparison.

To change the default used for folder comparisons open the folder viewer and select "Comparison Control" from the "Session" menu. In the new dialog change the "Compare Contents" option to "Size and CRC". Once that's done go back to the "Session" menu and select "Set Default...". In the new dialog click the "Set current settings as defaults" button. Once that's done BC will always default to using CRCs for it's background comparison whenever you compare a pair of folders from Explorer.

[Chris]

When you launch a folder comparison using the shell extension, BC uses the default comparison critieria, which is usually timestamp and size.

To change it, open BC. Set your preferred criteria in Session|Comparison Control. Then select Session|Set Default and click the "Set current settings as defaults" button. This will make all new sessions, including those launched from the shell extension, use the new criteria.

When doing a Folder to Folder comparison, CRC shouldn't be any faster than a binary comparison, and it might be slower. The CRC comparison requires the entire file to be read to calculate the CRC value to be compared. A binary comparison does a byte by byte comparison of two files, but stops as soon as it finds a difference, so if you have many different files, it has the potentional to be faster than CRC.

The case where CRC is useful is if you're comparing against a snapshot file with saved CRCs, or if you're comparing against an FTP server that supports generating CRCs on the server side. In the FTP server case, you'll see the command XCRC in the log if the server supports CRC generation, otherwise the file is downloaded and the CRC is calculated on the local machine.

[chrroe]

Hi tired!

When you open two files in the file-viewer they always are compared binary or better said line-by-line. AFAIK no crc compare is done.

In the folder-viewer the comparing method can be selected in the comparision control.

If this is not clear to you, please describe your scenario more verbosely ...


Bye
Christoph


Edit: Hmmpf, 3 answers in 3 minutes! If that's not enough, I don't know :D .

[tired]

I really appreciate all the replies. This kind of support gives me a huge incentive to register, which I almost certainly will, very soon. (Support is very important to me!)

Sorry for asking simple-minded questions, but for some reason, I am even more confused than usual while using BC. :p