How to re-sync directory listings

[JDługosz]

My first day evaluating: Looks very nice, in many ways! My interest is in auditing backup media of my >15 year old "Images" collection, which I started just before digital photography became a thing.

Here I moved files into subdirectories. In general, I'll move things around after doing the backup, so this is a common thing.



Each pane says it contains files not present in the other, but I can see that they just moved. If I chose "Align with..." from the context menu, and then click on the corresponding thing in the other pane, nothing interesting happens. The cursor says set as the question-pointer and I have the option of cancelling and the normal context menu is gone; so it's in some kind of mode for continuing action, and I have no idea what it means. The help states, "Note The easiest way to manually align two items in a folder session is to right-click the first item, pick Align With, then click the second item." My expectations are that they will match against each other now and show match or binary difference, but not be purple. What's this sticky mode?

For my use case, I don't need to keep the directory structure in the comparison at all. If it can find a match anywhere, that's good.

[Aaron]

Hello,

The issue here is that Align With only supports directories that are within the same tree level. If one is above or below (subfolders), then we don't support the re-alignment. It's more of a means to align items of different names, rather than of different structure locations.

We have the option to Ignore Folder Structure, which removes the structure from the comparison and aligns all files in one large bucket by file name. This requires no duplicate file names, but could otherwise help in this scenario. Or you can select any two folders and Compare In New View to launch an equal tree comparison of two subfolders.

[JDługosz]

Ignoring directories completely is fine, if I can avoid duplicate names.
Trying... seems to be taking its sweet time. Before, it showed the panes immediately and compared in the background, which I liked very much. Now there is no display, just the blinking stop icon.
... interesting... after a while it complained that the directory (for the left pane) was not found. Somehow it was un-mounted, which I fixed and let it continue. What's interesting is that the right pane showed all the filenames it scanned while it was paused, but then disappeared again when I told it to retry the directory path. It went all white again with no files showing. So it somehow doesn't want me to know how much progress it's making but insists on being mysterious, even though the structures are being populated.

[Aaron]

Hello,

Depending on your directory structure, ignoring the folder structure can take awhile to load since we need to visit and build every folder before we can display the file list. Once it is fully built, we are then able to display it at once, but it'll appear blank (with a blinking Cancel icon) until that can happen.