Last week I was faced with a challenge. I needed to transfer 108,998 files in 15,524 folders totaling 215GB in size from one hard drive to another on a server. Many people are too quick to trust a hard drive along with windows copy. But these two are not always perfect. Anyone who has ever copied an .avi from one hard drive to another only to have it not play correctly on the second hard drive knows what I am talking about. Sometimes files get messed up, bits and bytes get written incorrectly. Data integrity is threatened. So how could I be sure that all of my files were copied correctly before deleting them on the source hard drive? Well this was rather easy with a product called ViceVersa. ViceVersa verified my data after it was copied.
All the files and folders I had to copy
3 hours spent copying the files to the new hard drive
ViceVersa begins by asking you the source and target locations to compare. In my case, this is two different hard drives.
ViceVersa compares all the files in the source and target
ViceVersa finished in minutes comparing files and folders, confirming that they have identical filenames, paths, sizes, and various attributes. However this initial compare tells us nothing about the contents of the files. I had to go one step further.
To compare the contents of the files, go to the Lists menu> Verify> Verify/Recompare Source(s) and Target(s) using CRC
ViceVersa compares the contents of all files’ CRC values. This took a few hours.
ViceVersa is a great way to make sure backups are done properly. ViceVersa Pro version 2.0 is currently available from http://www.tgrmn.com/ . I recommend this product.
Was this a free product or trialware?
I have used Microsoft’s SyncToy 1.4 which is available here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx
It works great to accomplish the same thing you were faced with. SyncToy would in fact perform the copy for you as I believe ViceVersa would as well.
Ian
Thanks for the suggestion. ViceVersa is commercial software that costs $60 USD last time I checked. I always like finding free products that kick ass.
Sean
I don’t know what kind of crack you’re smoking, but viceversa is slow as shit over a network (even if the network is fast). The compare and step-through-filesystem mechanism they have is very inefficient, and sucks balls for a 60 dollar product.
Been syncing my work files over to my new machines – 100 GB, but the compare itself has taken about 9 hours of time so far.
hey i wrote this shit years ago and im open to suggestions. im transferring over an average of 4 million small files totally 10 terabytes per backup and this is a monthyly thing for my shit at home. I’m not smoking any crack, so if you have some positive suggestions, please do tell.