The figure shows the results of a command on two folders. Let's take a look at an example.įigure 10. Note that there may be unique and newer items in both folders - obviously not the same items - that need to be carried across. By copying them to the "passive" folder you ensure that the files in both folders are the same, both in number and most recent content. The drop-down menu lists some common scenarios for your convenience.Ī typical scenario is to select unique and newer files. selecting both "older" and "newer" files. There are checkboxes for all item states and you can check as many of them as you wish - although not all combinations make sense, e.g. The second phase is to decide which files you want to mark, ear-tag them for further processing. The relationship between files is fixed by their properties and the comparison scheme you select. if a change in daylight savings DST resulted in artificial 1-hour differences, you can set it to ignore this 1 hour - files differing by up to 1 hour will be considered identical as long as their size matches. You can use the Ignore tickbox at the bottom of the synchronization dialog to specify a different interval to ignore. NOTE: When comparisons are based on date modified (or any other date) two items are considered different if their dates are more than +/- 2 seconds apart. So a file can be newer or identical in terms of date created or date picture taken, depending on the column you select. Any piece of file metadata ( column) can be used, typically some date other than last modified. Files that exist in both folders are considered "identical" without further checks for dates or contents. This quick-n-dirty scheme will just find items that are missing from either folder. If in doubt you should open the files and manually inspect the content. Note that when differences are found, there's no way to tell which file is "newer" so xplorer² arbitrarily considers the version in the active pane as newer and the one in the inactive as older. This is a much slower but infallible method to compare for identity or otherwise. When dates are unreliable for one reason or other, you can check the actual data in the two files. This is the fastest way, when the date each file was last changed is used to determine if the two files are identical, and if not, which one is newer (the other one will then be older). If a file exists in both folders, the two copies are compared for differences, using the mechanism you specify: If a file in one folder doesn't have a matching namesake in the other folder, it is immediately considered unique (cf. The comparison logic first tries to match items left and right using the filename as a guide. The large number of combinations allows you to do all sorts of checks to suit your synchronization needs. The dialog in figure 9 ( Mark | Sync wizard command) indicates that comparison has two facets first you determine how you want to compare items and then which items to mark. Once you identify the differences, you can decide how to deal with them. It is ideal for comparing the contents of any two folders, and finding items that are missing from either one, or have been changed in any way. That's when xplorer² and its dual pane layout comes in handy. One of the folders may be on a floppy disk or on a remote computer, a zip file, FTP site, etc, where these advanced linking techniques won't help you. One way to achieve this would be to use folder junctions or hard links but this isn't always convenient. make sure all "versions" stay updated whenever you make changes to one of them. Many times you have two or more folders that have the same contents and you want to keep them synchronized, i.e. xplorer² has a number of advanced commands that help you restore order and reclaim wasted hard disk space. Xplorer² online help: Compare, synchronize and find duplicatesįile exploring reinvented: Feel like home miles away from home Examine and maintain your filesystemĭaily heavy-duty work on a PC will invariably result in a system that is suboptimal at best and unstable at worst.
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