Comparing folders and their subfolders - a bug?

[Daniel]

Hi,

I have a question about comparing folders. I want to compare everything, subfolders and their files too, and I gather that the way to do this is to flatten the two folders that I want to compare in a scrap container. Well, when I do that, and then run the sync function, xplorer2 ends up marking a few files, which are supposed to be different or not exist in the other folder, but the problem is that it also has a question mark on most files, meaning that it couldn't decide whether or not they were the same or different. In fact, this question mark is on so many files that this function is totally useless to me. I wonder when and why xplorer2 cannot compare the files. I certainly can manually - there seems to be nothing strange going on and many of the files that were undecided (if not all) seem to really exist in both folders, which identical sizes, identical modification dates, etc.
Is this a bug? Or is it something I've missed?

Thanks,
Daniel

[narayan]

For this synchronization to work properly, a single folder should be flattened in each pane. If you try to flatten multiple folders in each pane, such question marks will come up. (x2 will try its best, but no guarantees).

Tip: do not try to lessen work by selecting only a few folders. Instead, go upwards till you find a common parent and then flatten it. Later, you can sort on the path and remove all unwanted items from the scrap panes before synchronizing.

[nikos]

as the manual says, this deep synchronization will succeed if and only if the subfolder trees left and right are similar, since x2 matches folders first and items within folders next. Missing folders or completely dissimilar structures will result in question marks

[Daniel]

I wish there was an option for having it work like I wanted to, i e that "flatten" would take away all the information about which subfolder a file was in - like a "flatten twice" function. I think it could be useful.
For example: I had copied one folder to another computer, but then I had moved certain files around on the new computer, but couldn't remember exactly what I'd done. I wanted to first compare the two folders and search for differences. Then I wanted to keep the short cuts to whatever files were different and look for them in other place on the computer to see where I'd moved them. So I kept them, and put another folder in the other pane, hoping that I could search for differences between the panes. Maybe there's a more straightforward way to search for a number of files on a hard drive at the same time. But I can imagine other operations that could also be carried out easily with a "flatten twice" - for instance, suppose one wanted to find not duplicates but files which existed at three different places. That could be easily carried out. (Okay, maybe not so useful, but I like a program that instead of having each little thing as an option for the user, actually allows some simple functions, which combined in the right way are powerful and can solve problems that the developers didn't necessarily anticipate).

Daniel

[nikos]

there is a number of reasons why x2 insists on checking folder structure. One is the sync-o-paste command's book-keeping. Another one is dealing with files that appear more than once in each hierarchy

one workaround to your problem would be to manually flatten the hierarchy for the 2nd time using the "paste hard link" command. Create a new folder and paste hard links to all the flattened files (that should be quick and efficient). Then you can compare 2 simple folders

another possibility would be for me to have an option to disregard folder structure, but then i'd have to disable the sync-o-paste command so it's not clear what would you do with the results other than visual inspection

btw, the duplicates checker already checks for files that exist 3 or more times, despite its name