Compare Folders

File management is vital if you always want to keep your computer running in top condition. But if you’re constantly installing apps and storing content, then it can it become challenging to keep track of all the changes made and possible duplicates.

There are many simple file management tools that can make this process smoother. Compare Folders may be one such program.

The program’s main function is in its title, and as soon as you open it you can see that it’s a very intuitive tool, even if your daily activity doesn’t normally involve comparing folders and files. The design is nothing fancy, but everything the program does is displayed in a big text window where you can change both font and font-size.

With Compare Folders you can take four actions: compare folders, create checksum, find duplicates and update checksum.  The first action is pretty self-explanatory; with it the program verifies the contents of two folder and tells you how many identical files it found and how many files that belong only to one folder.

The “create checksum” function is easier to understand if you just know a little about hash values; basically they are strings of numbers and letters that can be generated by various algorithms and are unique to each file.

Hash values (also called “checksums”) can be used to identify file corruption, so what Compare Folders does is generate an XML files that lists the checksums of all the files in one folder. You can later use it to compare it to the original folder and see if it was modified in any way. This is basically the “update checksum” function.

And finally, there’s the “find duplicates” action which is also self-explanatory, and can be very useful when you wish to clean some of your computer’s storage. Even though Compare Folders is nothing to be amazed of, you may find it very useful to have around when you’re backing up folders, restoring them, or just trying to declutter your computer.