Any free File comparison software for Windows?

Question

I would like to compare a set of files and folders between two computers.

But there are so many folders ans subfolders, nested files.

So I would like to know if is there a recommended software to compare this folders and show me which files are different, specially in size.

Answer 1

Have you tried WinMerge?

Answer 2

Beside of comparison tools, like WinMerge, DiffMerge, Perforce Merge, you might also want to try using some synchronization tool: they often let you "preview" or "analyze" synchronization before performing it, which actually means comparing the two locations.

I have found AllwaysSync free version quite useful for this purpose.

Answer 3

If you are familiar with Unix command line utilities; I would suggest using Cygwin.

You can use one out of many "diff utilities" to show you the difference between the contents of two single files, or all files in two different folder. During Cygwin's installation process, the package you need to install for this to work is called diffutils. If you don't change any of the installation options, they should be installed as part of the default installation.

This is likely the fastest way to do what you want, especially if the folders you are comparing contain a lot of files. You can find diff's complete manual here, or by typing man diff in the Cygwin terminal window. There are a lot of different options you can specify to change the utility's behaviour.

If you need to compare files on two different computers, you can share the folders and diff them over the network, or copy the files to a temporary storage device, such as an USB stick or a portable harddrive (depending on how big the files are, of course).

Example:

You can find the difference between two folders like this.

I created Folder1, which contains these three files:

TextFile1.txt
TextFile2.txt
TextFile3.txt
CommonTextFile.txt

Then I created Folder2, which contains these three files:

TextFile4.txt
TextFile5.txt
TextFile6.txt
CommonTextFile.txt

Now, I simply diff the two folders against each other, like so:

diff Folder1 Folder2

This produces this output:

Only in Folder1: TextFile1.txt
Only in Folder1: TextFile2.txt
Only in Folder1: TextFile3.txt
Only in Folder2: TextFile4.txt
Only in Folder2: TextFile5.txt
Only in Folder2: TextFile6.txt