Compare Folders App Reviews

At first I thought this app was doing a good job until it told me 2 folders were identical while 1 of them had 2 more subfolders. How could 2 folders be identical, one with a size of 84GB and the other 216 GB! Can’t trust this app.

I wanted to use it to check differences between a NFS folder and a local one but I get an error: « failed retrieving file system info ». Works over CIFS.

I compared two folders. One has 50 GBs of MP3s the other one is empty. According to „Compare Folders“ those two folders do not have any differences at all. Absoulutely useless piece.

for me kdiff3 says, the files are binary identical -> this tool says, there is some change… dont know where or what, but not working as expected. :(

Only checks date and size without getting a plugin.

Went through trouble of running program and identifying files with differing modication dates and same file names. Deleted incorrect files and replaced them with correct files- re-ran program and it still identified same problem with old file names shown as being present when they had been deleted. Closed program- re-ran and got same result. Waited until disk was re-indexed and same problem identified with files listed that had been deleted (even tried secure deletion with same results). Not sure what I’m doing wrong...

Great app, easy to use. The one improvement request I would make is to make the file/folder easier/more intuitive - maybe have a an area in the window you can drop the files/folders you want to compare.

This utility provides a straightforward, side-by-side compare of two folders that are individually selected. There are user selectable filters to hone the compare display (e.g., compare permission differences, or not; compare creation date differences, or not; etc.) . There are also color highlights to help id the files which are identical and those with some type of difference. One minor request is for the significance of the colors to be defined somewhere (e.g., green = identical files in all analyzed parameters, while red & pink indicate what types of differences). This later point is why I downgraded the utility from 5 to 4 stars, upon initially using the utility I struggled to understand the colors and layout of filenames, when a short key or help file would have made the app more usable, more quickly. This app is not advertised to permit uses to make changes to the folders using this utility, you have to go back to the folder windows or another utility in order to make changes to one or the other file. All in all, very helpful and easy to use.

Simplle user interface with good comparison options. Great utility.

I have a very specialized use for this application. I’ve got a 6 TB RAID (media server) that I back up about once a month (12 hours over TB to back up, btw). I’d like to run a little utility to compare my media server drive against the backup drive, once the backup is created. Ideally, the comparison should take the same amount of time as the backup (or less, as reading disks is faster than writing them). So I copied a 32 GB subdirectory. This took about 2 minutes (SSDs on a Retina MacBook Pro). Running “diff -rq dir1 dir1Copy” took 2:32. Compare Folders (with $5 in-app purchase to do binary comparisons) took 4:48. IOW, I would expect Compare Folders to take over twice as long (24 hours) to compare the two drives as it took to back them up. Using diff is a bit cumbersome, but to save 12 hours, I can live with that. The program will probably work for other use cases; certainly not the best choice for backup comparisons. Oh well, $5 was worth the attempt.

I purchased this application several months ago to assist with cleaning up a large number of duplicate folders and files that have accumulated over the years on a number of computers, hard drives, and flash drives that comprise my computer system. After a short learning curve to learn precisely how the program was working, I found it to be a VERY useful tool for finding, analyzing, and cleaning up the files / folders on my system. If I properly recall, I purchased the base app for ~ $2 … and was so happy with the functioning of the application that I bought the in-app purchase (adding the use of Checksums information to the comparison of duplicate files) the first time that I used it. To me, the application is well worth the ~ $5 - $7 that I paid for it. I am quite happy with the value of the program.

Great stuff here – we have a growing number of large media files (photo, video, audio) on external drives that I back up on a regular basis. I use this to double check everything is copied correctly or if I missed anything. The app has good comparison and viewing options to choose from as well

I think the app is good. I am not entirely sure as I do not know what the different colors represent and I have a number of files that look to be identical but show up and are colored a certain color even though I have "exclude identical items" checked off. So … this app may be great, but it is near impossible to tell when there is no clarification of what is going on. With clarification, Id give it 5 stars, but without, since I cannot tell if it actually works, how can I give it more than 3?

This is a very capable app, and a real time saver. As described, it shows the contents of folders side-by-side, and color-highlights them based on sameness or differences, and displays the details below (where the item that differs is in red type). Has filters that you can use de-select showing certain comparisons (e.g., identical items can be hidden so you can focus on the differences). Filters also include characteristics like creation date, symbolic links, and other things that you might want to filter out. I’m impressed by how much this app offers — and the author should be thanked for making it available for foree.

It does compare two directories all right. But then... you can’t do anything. The idea is to be able to sync files/folders! You can’t copy, move, not even ask to “Show in Finder”. Once the lists are built, they are static and you cannot do anything with the files.

For a free app this is great. Actually I bought the checksum feature not that I needed it but mainly to support the devloper. For what I needed to use it at the time it met my needs. I then started to think what would make this app even better and here’s a short list. - Drag and drop folders onto the icon or window so I wouldn’t have to manually select them with the file chooser - Command line wrapper to launch the application passing in the directories to compare such as “cf ~/dir1 ~/dir” - Option to show in hierarchy directory structure like the list view in Finder. I would gladly pay for these features. Once again nice job. Looking forward to future updates.

Excellent free app. I am going to download the checksum app to use on those rare occasions I need a mission critical copy (like my photo library). But for day to day file moving this is an awesome free app!

Id expect to use a tool like this to check if files in two folders are different or missing. And this sortof works, provided the missing item(s) are only in the "left" folder. But its a one-way operation; anything missing in the "right" folder wont show up in either list! Youve got to run the diff twice, with each folder taking turns in the "left" and "right" spots. And since theres no swap-left-and-right button and no drag-drop support, its a bit laborious to do this.

It does seem to have issues when comparing between two different machines aceoss a LAN. It’s also a real pain when doing successive compares, such as comparing a 2004 archive and then a 2005 archive. This is because as soon as you pick a sopurce for a folder it starts comparing…without giving you a chance to select the source for the right folder. It can take 5 minutes on large file systems to traverse the tree, so you wait 5 minutes just to be able to specify the correct other folder. That is, it is very difficult to chage BOTH folders before comparing again. For smaller folders and file systems it seems to be great. But we have a lot of folders to compare and it’s UI is a pain because we can’t set the ;eft and right and then tell it to start…and you CANNOT interrupt or stop it once it starts…you just wait the 5-minutes for it to finish comparing the wrong two olders. By the ay, there is NOT identification of the developer, no developer phone or email or web site. They do link to a forum that looks like it has been a year without many updates. It does make me wonder...

this is a nice free tool on the App store it is fast and clean if you visually want to see a folder tree diff. I love it.