Compare and Find Missing Files

nIGHTmAYOR · 26 Nov 2018

Usually on upgrading my disks and cards for higher capacities 99% of the time I face an unrecoverable copy interruption the reasons may vary and 99% of the time its windows idiocy .

The funny thing is the straight forward solution never works for me , I did test it over several machines and it did not work . which is re-copying then accept skipping of already copied files while ticking to do so for all upcoming request .

What happens is that the copy dialog roughly advance to 100% skipping the whole copy process , I think this is a glitch that date way back older than I can remember and yet nobody really bother investigating its reason .

So the official work around is to copy and accept replacing of already copied files no matter how time consuming that is and file fragmentation it may cause to new media .

It occurred to me i should find a folder compare utility that would allow me to compare across medias i am copying to be able to copy only remaining files thinking it would be an easy task .

Problem is I keep landing on comparing tools that insist of not doing just file names/existence compare but a bite to bite compare as well like Winmerge etc that would consume more time than recopying everything .

So my question is , is there something i am missing about windows file copying skipping what is found specially on large volume of files ? and if not , is there any known tool that can just do the simple task of comparing folders & their subs a file name only compare with the possibility of selecting and copying differences only ?

Try3 · 26 Nov 2018

It seems to me that the most appropriate utility for you would be the built-in command RoboCopy. It will check the contents of the destination and copy across files from the source that are needed even though a previous attempt has been made.

Just by way of example, I use this command to copy the whole of my C:\Tools folder to a corresponding folder on a USB

Code:

ROBOCOPY "C:\Tools" F:\Tools" /MIR /DCOPY:DAT /R:0 /XA:SH

You can see explanations by entering RoboCopy /? in a command prompt or PowerShell window. There are many explanations online as well - see, for example, RoboCopy - SS64

There is a GUI for RoboCopy. It is called RichCopy. You can download it from http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...ght2009_04.exe
and you will find an explanation at RichCopy - Joshua Hoffmann [updated article]

Denis

nIGHTmAYOR · 26 Nov 2018

I know of robocopy and its gui but i often dodge it , its an insane app despite how everybody think high of it . you do not get one single file showing not until the entire copy process is complete , probably use database commit like procedure , and it doesnt check for enough disk space before writing so if it hits edge it fails and you still got nothing on the drive , and of course no meter or a mean to estimate time left or current % or whatever not even on gui .