Comparing and Merging large directories

[Pondlife]

I have all my music stored on both a home network drive and a USB HD but over the past few years they've got out of sync.

What's the best (free) app that can compare/merge the differences?

I want to avoid creating loads of duplicates.

DiffMerge just hangs, probably due to the number of files.

Either Win or Mac solution will do although Mac preferred.

TIA

PL

[SimonMac]

I have all my music stored on both a home network drive and a USB HD but over the past few years they've got out of sync.

What's the best (free) app that can compare/merge the differences?

I want to avoid creating loads of duplicates.

DiffMerge just hangs, probably due to the number of files.

Either Win or Mac solution will do although Mac preferred.

TIA

PL

If a file is a duplicate would it have the same name in both locations? If so you could do it quite easily with something like Robocopy

[Pondlife]

If a file is a duplicate would it have the same name in both locations? If so you could do it quite easily with something like Robocopy

Same name yes but possibly different timestamps.

I will have a google, Ta.

[Pondlife]

cp with -R -n and -v seems to work but I'll have to do it both ways so to speak

[DimPrawn]

If it has the same name, is it the same thing? If so, you can just xcopy them over to one directory and set the command line flags to deal with duplicates (ignore, overwrite, etc)?

[stek]

Try TidyUp for Mac, or use the command line, look at mv, ditto etc

[Pondlife]

If it has the same name, is it the same thing? If so, you can just xcopy them over to one directory and set the command line flags to deal with duplicates (ignore, overwrite, etc)?

Yeah, it's the same but I was hoping for a nice sync app with pretty screens Essentially doing this now with cp rather than xcopy

Try TidyUp for Mac, or use the command line, look at mv, ditto etc

Will have a look at TidyUp later for future use.


Ta all.

[Durbs]

For all compare jobs i use Compare files and directories with this file comparison software - Beyond Compare is a powerful, time-saving file compare utility.

Not free (although the trial never used to expire for some reason) but is a great tool to have around and worth the cash.

[PAH]

I also recommend Beyond Compare if you're after a nice front end, which helps when manually checking contents of folders to make sure you don't overwrite the wrong stuff.

I also use Dsynchronize (which is free) for semi-automatically syncing folders for backup purposes. It allows a list of source/destination folders to be set up so resyncing later can be done at the click of a button.

[billybiro]

For a really nice utility that'll synchronize, merge or backup folders of files try SyncBack.
(2BrightSparks | SyncBackSE)

There's a free version and also paid-for versions, but the free version will probably suit your needs. There's a number of options for synchronizing too based on one folder always overwrites the other, based on last modified date etc.

I've been using it for years to synchronize my files and folders between hard-disks.