Compare folders on two servers

[Jason411]

I'm trying to compare two folders. i.e.
smb://<SERVER1>/Macintosh HD/FolderA
smb://<SERVER>2>/Macintosh HD/FolderA

It looks like it's going to work as it Mounts the first "Macintosh HD" on my system. But then once that's mounted it fails to mount the second "Macintosh HD".

How could i use Beyond Compare to compare the contents of folders on two different servers if they all share the same "Macintosh HD" name for the HD?

I'm guessing a work around would be to copy the folders I want to compare locally and then compare that way, but thats a PITA if they're large.

Thanks

[dempson]

Are you mounting the drives using Beyond Compare? If you use Finder to mount two volumes which have the same name, the system automatically mounts the first one in /Volumes using the name of the volume, but due to the conflicting name, it mounts the second one by appending a sequence number to the volume name, e.g. you would find "/Volumes/Macintosh HD" and "/Volumes/Macintosh HD 1". (These are the names of the temporary folder used as a mount point - the name of the actual drive is not affected.)

The user doesn't see the numeric suffix unless they go poking into /Volumes (or look in Terminal) - Finder and the rest of the OS X GUI shows both volumes mounted with the actual name of the volume, thus you have two icons on the desktop/sidebar with the same name, and it is the user's problem to tell them apart.

If Beyond Compare is mounting the shares itself, it should be following the same convention with a numeric suffix on the mount point folder, otherwise it will fail to mount a volume which has the same name as another volume which is already mounted (possibly including the startup drive, which has a symbolic link in /Volumes matching its name, which points to the root directory).

For my own drives, I like to avoid this sort of problem (and my own potential confusion as to which drive is which if I have two of them mounted at once) by assigning each hard drive a unique name, typically based on the name I've assigned to the computer. None of my main machines have a volume called "Macintosh HD".

This may be a reasonable workaround, if both networked computers are under your control.

You can rename hard drives (even the current startup volume) on the host machine as an admin user in Finder, either by clicking on the name for the desktop icon for the volume, or if you don't have the volume icons displayed on the desktop, via Go > Computer.

Renaming the startup volume rarely causes problems in OS X because its name doesn't form part of the pathname. (It is more likely to be an issue with some old applications or AppleScripts which use pathname mechanisms dating back to Mac OS 9 or earlier, if the software is lazy and stores pathnames in text form rather than using more robust methods based on aliases or volume ID numbers.)

[Aaron]

Hello,

We've tested this with the latest build and a few tweaks and it seems to be working. I would suggest updating and giving it a try, and double checking the permissions you have set for the user connecting (user account, group, or guest).