Question of Capability: Analyze two locations with different directory structures

[gexiv]

Odd situation here.

Background: Myhardrive had a strange error due to a 3'rd party program all the files in "my documents" got deleted but place holder file icons still remain in place with the correct name and ext. All files are 1kb and unusable. After all this happened I was able to recover data using Recuva to recover all office documents. I now have a partition (X) that holds all documents but the folder structure is not intact.

As I mentioned above - I still have the folders with place holder files named correctly. To the eye it appears as if nothing is wrong. Except that non of th edocs are operational. Currently I can go through by hand and copy the "bad" office doc name and then search for it on the "X" partition and find the "good" recovered file. Copy it to a new "third party" location and recreate the directories by hand etc. This is really slow and cumbersome

What I am wondering is this -

Question: Would beyondcompare 3 be able to compare and merge?

Basically I am wondering if I can get the program to look at folder1 search the "X" partition for matching files and then allow me to select the "real" files from the "X" directory and apply them to folder1?

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I'm new to this so I apologize if the above information is not very clear.

Thanks!

-Gex

PS - it needs to only search off of file name, due to recovery the files do not have all the same meta data and the binary looks differnt.

[Aaron]

Hello,

If I understand the situation correctly, you have 3 folders: the corrupted original location, a recovered version of the original location, and a destination.

You can compare any two locations using BC3's Folder Compare, which can align by folder structure and file name, and find any files with different sizes. You can then select these differences and copy them from one side to the other, or copy them to a third location (optionally preserving the folder structure).

Please note that BC3 does not have an undo command, so please be sure you wish to commit the action (copy, overwrite, delete, etc) before you click Ok.

The trial of BC3 is fully featured, and we have a tutorial video also available to help setup a basic comparison:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/download.php
http://www.scootersoftware.com/moreinfo.php?zz=videos

You will want to open the compare in such a way that the relative folder structure matches:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/morei...=FolderCompare
Otherwise, you can use our Ignore Folder Structure option, but this requires that all file names be unique, as the alignment still occurs on (now only) the file name, and not the content of the file.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

[gexiv]

Aaron,

Thank you so much for the reply! I was starting to lose hope that a program could do this. You are correct that I have three locations - 1. corrupted 2. recovered 3. Destination

However the folder structure in location 1 and 2 do not match. Location 2 has the correct files but the wrong folder structure (its all a mess from recovering the files) If I understand you correctly I can set BC3 up to ignore the folder structure and simply compare files by name? This would be awesome, if that is the case I would like to simply be able to copy the recovered files and overwrite the corrupted files in the correct folder structure.

I am going to try and see what I can do. I am a little overwhelmed by the program since it seems very advanced but I am unsure how to use it. I will look a the tutorials you posted. If you have any advice on where to find the "ignore folder structure" option that would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!


***edit***

I watched the videos and saw the feature you referenced. I will now give it a try. Thankyou very much.