Compare Folders App Reviews

Compare Folders is fast, has a simple, easy-to-understand user interface and many useful filters. It is nice that these filters can be invoked after the fact; you don’t have to re-run the comparison. I looked into this as a tool for checking whether a Migration Assitant transfer was completely successful after one of our Mac User Group members had some files missing after migrating to a new computer. I tested the concept by comparing my User folder (289GB, 270,000+ files) on my Mac with with the same folder on a week-old SuperDuper backup on an external hard drive. Compare Folders took about 3 minutes to complete this task (using just size and modification date as criteria). I also made sure that it treated Packages like iTunes and iPhoto databases properly, i.e., compared items down to the level of the individual songs and photos. I haven’t yet tested it to compare old computer and new computer files after a Migration Assistant transfer but I am quite confident that it will work.

It does pretty much exactly what I was looking for - the capability to check if folders have the same contents or not, without having to check item by item. When I’m looking at dozens of folders, possibly hundreds of subfolders - makes something that would otherwise be impractical to do practical! However, it would be great if the UI made it clearer what files are within each folder (like in Finder possibly, with the indentation), and some sort of explanation/help/tips for what the different colors mean.

The user interface suffers from never quite being sure how to do it or if you’ve succeeded at doing it. I compared multiple folders on a couple of big USB drives and I think I proved to myself that they were equal. The two panels line up the corresponding files in the folders under comparison. I think if you don’t see any red lines you’re in good shape. I wish there was an indicator that simply says, “Both folders are the same”. That’s what you want to know at the high level. I wish you could click something that says “Go”.

Need to clearly identify the left and right drives. Shows duplicate folders, can’t have duplicate folders I don;t know why i’m writing this. It hasn;t been updated in over a year and probably won’t get updated

It compares the size and last modified data and calls it a match or not match. If you want to compare the content of the folders then you have to buy that feature. Pretty useless. 2 star!! 1 for writting a code second it has some utility (not so useful). In short it is an adverstise app for the real useful app.

I really like the look and feel of the app and also that its hosted on GitHub. Even with the basic file-size based comparison, i found it did not accurately report results. For example, on the left i chose a folder which has 2 folders with videos inside it; on the right was the same root folder on another drive but with only 1 of the 2 subdirectories. The window showed no differences! im sure its just a simple bug that will be patched soon, but i will use another application for mission critical work. Best wishes to the team.

I needed a quick way of checking if all of my music files were on my NAS drive. Since I make back ups of the NAS each night, a quick check of the folders was all I needed. I have over 2 TB of music stored on the NAS, so obviously doing this manually was not possible. I tried the Terminal diff command and got gobbly error messages. I tried compare folders and instantly got the comparison I was looking for. I was able to filter the folders that were irrelevant and got just what I needed. Great little app… and if you don’t want checksum support, it’s free!

It shows you which files are different, but that’s it. If I want to see what the differences are, I am out of luck. If I didn’t know that the files were different, I wouldn’t be comparing them. What I need to know is what is different, and this app does not do that. What’s worse is that I bought the checksum feature thinking that it would permit me to see the actual differences. That was $4.99 totally wasted. I wish that I could get my money back on that. Unfortunately, that’s now how it works and I’m out the $4.99. Live and learn, I guess. I should have read the reviews before purchasing. Oh well, developer gets a latte on me. Enjoy. I’m off to find something that does comparisons and actually shows the differences.

I had to restore about 1TB of data from some backups to my boot drive, and I used this app to compare the source and target folders and make sure everything was copied. Overall it worked quickly and well. I liked the option “Exclude files” so that it would compare only folders, which was a much shorter list. The downside was that apparently found that every file had permission differences between the version on the backup and the version on the boot drive. This may result from how Mac OS treats these drives differently. However, using the “Exclude items with only permission differences” feature, most of those false positives were eliminated. I did not use the in-app purchse for checksums. Overall, I was pleased with this app and it gave me confidence that my restores were correct and complete. One minor quirk. There are three buttons, “Select Left Folder…”, “Select Right Folder…” and “Compare Again”. After I finished a comparison, I wanted to select both a new left and right folder for another comparison. I found that after I selected a new left folder, the app started doing a comparison between the new left folder and the old right folder. I had to click the little X button to stop it, then select my new right folder. This is a very minor annoyance, but I think it would be better if the app did not start the comparison automatically and the last button could simply be “Compare”.

This applicaiton does a pretty good job of file comparison. However, if you are trying to merge files into a folder you will have to do that manually. To assist that, I would have liked this application to provide a print out. The filters it provides can be quite handy when trying to just compare files with their creation dates or their modification dates but not both. Checking on/off the filter boxes (e.g., exact match) gives you a clue to the color coding of the lines. Green means an exact match on one side of a scale while red means total difference (no file name match) on the other side of the scale. Using this makes me want to be able to move copies of files/folders from one side to the other so files/folders are merged into one of the top level folders that are named from which comparison is made. However, this app does not provide an auto or semi-auto sync capability. The checksum provides another level of checking to determine file differences and just not date differences. However, oftentimes I have a date field in a word document that gets updated everytime I open the file so not only will the modification date get updated but so will the checksum change. I paid for the checksum anyway to help promote the software but I am not sure how much use I will get out of it. For those of you wondering, this did work with El Capitan 10.11.1 even though it was last updated in 2014. If you are verifying a backup copy, such as by superduper, I can see how this would be very useful.

It’s an excellent tool for comparing files and folders. I wish that the last the select left folder and select right folder had their own last used list rather than sharing a single list. This way I could I could move around one drive from the select left folder option and another drive from the right folder option without having to start at the root of the drives each time. This is especially useful when making asymmetrical backups.

I like the thoroughness of the application and it does exactly what is says, I like the exclusions, and I like that it uses checksums with the optional in-app purchase. What it REALLY needs though as far as an update to the user interface are a few basic features. 1) It needs a “Go” button, I do not want it automatically to start comparing when I change one side of the comparison. 2) It needs a progress bar that actually shows something.. it does not show any progress from start to finish.. there is a token one.. but there is not even a duration running or a percent complete. I had one drive take over 24 hours to compare and I had no idea where it was in its progress. 3) There is NO SYNCRONIZE folders button or even EXPORT to text. When I compared even with all exclusions turned on it was still an overwhelming list of differences I could DO NOTHING with other than scroll and go “ok, no what”. 4) It needs hide individual files (something different than the existing ‘exclude files does) and just show a list of folders that its contents are out of sync, being that it doesn’t have a syncronize feature this would greatly assist in me manually getting them into sync.

This app coupled with OSX’s built-in FileMerge, just saved me from a lot of head-scratching and swearing. I wish good things to the people behind this. Thank you.

This application just saved me lots of trouble. My primary OS X system boot drive became un-bootable and I had to recover by booting from a backup drive that was made many months ago. During the interval (too long) between backups I had upgraded and/or installed a number of applications. I was able to mount the unbootable drive and compare the applications folder on it to the applications folder from the backup system drive. The Compare Folders application made it easy to identify the upgraded and new apps which I then copied from the un-bootable drive to my current system drive. In my case this included 69 applications! Thank you for creating a very useful utility!

I wanted to compare a folder with a backup NAS via either CIFS or AFP. This program is unable to handle that. When you try to open the remote folder, it only allows you to select the top-level share. It won’t let you select one of the folders in the share.

Using the in-app purchase menu, I purchased the “File Checksums” add on feature. The app store authenticated me and then charged my account the $4.99. The feature didn’t activate in Compare Folders. It still gives a link to “learn more…” about the feature. The screen shot in the app store shows the feature with a check box to use. I’ve tried the “Restore Purchases…” menu in Compare Folders and it either doesn’t do anything or displays an error trying to connect to the app store. I’ve purchased plenty of other apps on the app store with no problem. Seems like a bug. There doesn’t seem to be a way to get my money back and the support link directs you to an issues page on the developer’s github site. I created an “issue” and will see if there is any response. I’ll update my review if the problem gets resolved. **UPDATE** The developer responded to my support issue very quickly. The solution: I had to delete the app, reboot and then reinstall the app. That fixed the problem and the checksum feature was activated.