Saving Differences Report to HMTL taking forever

[ziceman]

Hello,

We are testing BC on a Win2008 server, and it seemed to do a great job of checking the files & folders between servers. I am trying to generate a HTML report of the differences found that includes link, and the process has been running for over an hour now. Is this normal? How long should this take? There is around 500 gig of data with quite a few files and folders, but the comparison itself completed in a matter of minutes. Also, the differences (which I selected from the report option, not ALL), are only a few dozen items.

Please advise.

Thank much!

[Aaron]

Hello,

The default comparison in the Folder Compare is timestamp/size metadata, while the report to include file-links would generate file views with all file data. How large are the files you are generating the file-links for? If you are selecting and generating a report on 500gb of files, then you are attempting to generate a report with 500gb of linked html data, which is larger than intended.

The file-linked reports use the last state used in the graphical interface for that session type; if you launch specific sessions and set to Show Differences, the linked file reports will be smaller by only working with the difference section.

[ziceman]

Thanks for the reply, Aaron.

Only the Differences are showing in the program window when I try to generate the report.

When I create the HTML report without file links, it takes a matter of seconds and looks correct. If the file links option is checked, the task never finishes.

[Aaron]

Hello,

The file-link report uses the view's default Display Filters (what's visible in the main pane), not necessarily the last generated report options. You'll have to update the toolbar or View menu of the child File Viewer to update the file-link report.

As an exaggerated example, if you have 10 files, but one of them is 500gb in size, a regular folder report would show the 10 files as equal or different, but the file-link report would attempt to generate a 500gb html comparison file report, which would take significantly longer (and is larger than our test cases, as while we'll often eventually finish generating enormous reports, most web browsers are unable to open them).

Also, are you using the latest BC 4.2.4 release? We did have a few specific issues sometimes attributed to generating file-link reports. All 4.x updates are free for 4.x users. Although, my primary hunch is still that at least one of the file-link reports is larger than expected, which would explain the difference in generation time.