newbie ?? on folder compare

[harveyabc]

trying to compare photo files on hard drive with those on ext drive. after having manually compared all folders on both drives there are 48 gbs. more on the pc than the ext drive.
i was very careful in the manual comparison and am pretty sure that both drives match up.
i have run a folder compare session and don't know what to do next.

i could sync both drives but am using adobe lightroom and am concerned that if i do sync it will screw up the catalog.

[Aaron]

I'm not as familiar with Adobe Lightroom, but if you test by copying and replacing 1 file (instead of syncing the whole directory), does that cause problems in the catelog? If not, then try a couple more files. BC3 does not support an Undo command, so please be sure it is not going to interfere with your catalog setup before committing the whole sync.

If you have the extra hdd space, are you able to make a copy of the destination (with catalog) to another location as a backup, with preserved catalog information? This way, if the sync does do something, you could restore from this backup?

[harveyabc]

i do have another ext drive. will have to research this before i do anything.
thansk aaron.

[maurice]

disk space differences

Questions like this can be difficult to troubleshoot from afar without seeming insulting, so please don't be.

If you have a completed compare (compare only file size & dates to expedite!), BC should also show the total file count and total size in the message area at the bottom margin of the folder compare window. If you see your 48Gb difference, check the option to show only orphans to see if any are missing. You may want to expand all folders. Make sure you don't have any filters or grammar rules that could exclude any files. After you are happy you have all your files copied, you may want to run a binary compare to confirm. Again, you will be able to verify file count and space stats in the bottom margin when completed.

There are several things that could affect the space reported as used on your PC's drive. For example, the external drive may have a more efficient formatting, or may even be compressed (although audio files won't compress much.) The difference may be small per file, but multiplied x thousands can still have a large impact, of course (but 48Gb? hmmm)

Again, not trying to be insulting, but depending on how you are reading the space used, you may also be looking at more than you think you are. In Windows, right-click the top-folder you want to know about and select Properties to get the total size of all contents.

Good luck

[debaumar]

Simple Folder Compare

I'm new in scripting.

I want to compare two folders and get a message only if there are any differences. Is this possible ?

I have already tried to analyse the errorlevel, but the value is always 0, equal if the directories are identical or not.

Thanks for your support.

[Chris]

Beyond Compare can only return comparison results as an error level when comparing pairs of files. Folder comparison that returns an error level isn't supported.

To compare a pair of files from the command line, use the /qc or /quickcompare command line switch. A list of error levels is available in the "Command Line Reference" in Beyond Compare 3's help file.

You can script a folder comparison that is output as a report file, but it will list the names of different files. BC doesn't provide a way to get only a match or mismatch result from a folder comparison through the command line.