Can anyone suggest a utility or method to compare directories and their contents?

I have transferred about 70GB or MP3/FLAC audio from an external fixed disk to a Mac (G4 10.5) and it failed with about 2GB still to copy (due to a bizarre permissions error).

Due to the number of subdirectories and files involved Im looking for a utility which will compare the directories, subdirectories and their contents on the duplicate with the orginal, so that I am able to identify which directories are either missing or incomplete.

Any helpful suggestions appreciated.

 

A few things spring to mind:
http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com
http://www.araxis.com/merge/index.en

The former is a very funky bit of software (even does image comparison too), it will allow you to compare a folder structure from one disk to another.

I'm not sure if the following will be of use. I have a Media external and a Backup external and I typically backup the Media folder to the Backup drive. I usually forget what I've put on the Media drive, and I've deleted the odd thing here and there, so was looking for some way of copying over only the missing / changed items, and NOT deleting items on the backup that are not on the Media drive.

I had been using the aRsync app, but it kept giving me permission errors and the log was non existent, so I decided to learn a bit about rsync, and through doing so, I have a script that will check the Media drive against the Media folder on the backup drive and only copy over the new / changed items. Default mode is to print out the differences, i.e.; what will be copied.

It sounds as though that might be what you'd want, i.e. check the external source against the internal destination, display what wasn't copied, and then you can dig in and fix permissions, or just get it to copy over just those items.

Here is the script:
Basically, if you whack that into a file, save it as "something.bash" and then fire up terminal and "chmod +x" it, you can execute it using ./NameOfScript.bash
If you copy it to /usr/bin (need to use sudo) then it's avaialble to all shells and can be run by just typing NameOfScript.bash

The two things you would want to change are:

the_source_folder_path="/Volumes/Media"

Change "/Volumes/Media" to the path to the folder on the external that contains all the files / folders

So the same thing for:

the_destination_folder_path="/Volumes/Backup/"

Changing "/Volumes/Backup/" to the path of the folder on the internal disk where the files and folders are copied into.

I'd guess you would be changing the_source_folder_path to something like "/Volumes/External/Music" and the the_destination_folder_path to "/Users/username/Music"

Here's the exclusion file that is mentioned:
There are items to be excluded, as you don't need the ds_store files from all of the sub-folders being copied.

 

Thank you.