TreeComp rocks!

I remember using this nifty tool years back when working in the Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo - TreeComp. Its a great way to compare hundreds/thousands of files to verify backups or installations and helped me handle a massive upgrade to Wells Fargo's application and documentation server farm (I tricked Windows into comparing trees that were actually networked maps onto samba shares with Solaris backends).

Anyways, I'm upgrading one of my PCs to Vista x64 from Vista x32 and I'm not sure I can simply rely on my Windows Home Server backups for restoring just the data files I want kept from my Vista x32 installation. So I'm covering my bases by manually copying all the critical data files I want in my new Vista x64 installation (I'll be wiping the hard drive for a fresh clean Vista x64 install).

Well after a long copy process, some files failed to copy over due to filenames being too long or something like that (most likely within my Music files section). So am not sure exactly how much was copied and don't really want to re-copy everything. So TreeComp to the rescue. This cool tool will allow you to choose two top level parent directories and it will compare the two tree branches for you. Further, once you've identified the folders that are missing on one side of the comparison, its as easy as right clicking left side for instance, and commanding it to sync to right side effectively filling in the gaps from where copy failed originally. Of course you could do this at the top root as well to do this all in one shot.

I'm glad this homegrown tool still lives on even with Vista. Well done Lennert Ploeger!