Cleaning up folder copies with WinMerge
I am a paranoid person when it comes to keeping copies of files. I hate the idea of losing data because I accidentally hit delete, especially photos. I am not talking about keeping a copy on a separate hard drive. I often will copy a folder when I plan on making a change to it, but then I never go back and clean up the copy.
I did this with my photos folder a few years ago. I planned to have two versions of my images folder, one with RAW files and one with JPEG. I abandoned the project, deciding instead to move the RAW images into a separate folder inside each sub folder. A few years later and I am left with a hard drive full of image duplicates, but I was too nervous to remove them in case there were other changes I made than what I remembered.
I found a free program called WinMerge. It will go through two folders and tell you which files are different. In my case it told me that there were a lot of files in the original folder that are not in the new folder.
The program tells you which files are different, either only in one side or has been changed. It will show you which file is newest, which is larger, and other information that I didn't dig into. You can sort by column as well. In my case I sorted by "Comparison Result". This sorts the files by the ones that are in both places but are not identical, then by the files that are only in the folder on the right side followed by the files only in the left side, then by the files that are the same. This made going through the folders a breeze since it presented exactly the information I was looking for.
The best part is that WinMerge will go through and compare each file bit for bit. If there is the smallest difference it will find it and notify you. I recently ran it before deleting the pictures I had just taken off my memory card. It turned out one of the images had only been copied half way, the last few megabytes of the file were full of zeros not image data. If I hadn't used WinMerge checking the file size and the date created would have not caught this problem.
While this isn't a full review, I was able to use the program to confirm that the newer copy of my Pictures folder didn't contain anything that was not already in the original and that it is safe to delete it. I will be getting about 150 GB back on my hard drive!
Next step, backing them up to the cloud...
I did this with my photos folder a few years ago. I planned to have two versions of my images folder, one with RAW files and one with JPEG. I abandoned the project, deciding instead to move the RAW images into a separate folder inside each sub folder. A few years later and I am left with a hard drive full of image duplicates, but I was too nervous to remove them in case there were other changes I made than what I remembered.
I found a free program called WinMerge. It will go through two folders and tell you which files are different. In my case it told me that there were a lot of files in the original folder that are not in the new folder.
The program tells you which files are different, either only in one side or has been changed. It will show you which file is newest, which is larger, and other information that I didn't dig into. You can sort by column as well. In my case I sorted by "Comparison Result". This sorts the files by the ones that are in both places but are not identical, then by the files that are only in the folder on the right side followed by the files only in the left side, then by the files that are the same. This made going through the folders a breeze since it presented exactly the information I was looking for.
The best part is that WinMerge will go through and compare each file bit for bit. If there is the smallest difference it will find it and notify you. I recently ran it before deleting the pictures I had just taken off my memory card. It turned out one of the images had only been copied half way, the last few megabytes of the file were full of zeros not image data. If I hadn't used WinMerge checking the file size and the date created would have not caught this problem.
While this isn't a full review, I was able to use the program to confirm that the newer copy of my Pictures folder didn't contain anything that was not already in the original and that it is safe to delete it. I will be getting about 150 GB back on my hard drive!
Next step, backing them up to the cloud...
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