Moving / Copying files and folders

[pb445]

I've found Beyond Compare extremely useful as a replacement for Windows Explorer when I have to move / copy files and folders from A to B.

Recently I was using BC to move files and folders from a laptop to a server. The laptop was connected to our LAN via a slightly flakey wireless connection and from time to time the laptop's wireless connection would "drop out", resulting in "Failed to move..." messages in Beyond Compare's log file.

I gave the laptop time to re-establish its wireless connection and continued my file move via Beyond Compare 3.

Because of the flakey wireless connection, BC's log file showed a mixture of "Failed to move..." and "Successfully moved..." messages.

This got me to wondering: when BC says it has "Successfully moved" a file from A to B, how does it make such a determination? Is it relying on the underlying Windows file system to respond saying "Yes that file was closed successfully on the destination" or is there something more sophisticated involved within BC itself, whereby it tracks a checksum or CRC of each file as it performs the move / copy operation?

I guess I'm being paranoid, but sometimes after having used Windows Explorer to copy important files and folders, I will fire up BC and take the time to perform a Binary comparison of each and every one of those files and folders. When BC tells me both sets of files and folders are "binary same", I gain a lot of reassurance.

So my question is, when BC says it has "Successfully moved" (or copied) a file from A to B, how certain can I be that this is actually the case? The ludicrous notion enters my mind of running a 2nd pass of BC across files it has copied, doing a Binary comparison, to make sure they really are identical.

My therapist would have a field day with this! :-)

Thanks in advance for any insight offered.

Paul.

[Zoë]

Hi Paul,

BC just relies on Windows to tell us the copy/move has succeeded. We've talked about having a verify-after-copy option, but it isn't in yet, so if you actually want to do that you'll need to do it as a separate step.

[Michael Bulgrien]

You can temporarily add the CRC column to your folder compare. This forces BC3 to read the copied file to calculate the checksum (which almost equates to an automatic verify-after-copy).