In my work life, I use several tools. I thought I'd tell you about some of them. Most of these are free and some are portable. The first one I have made use of recently is WinMerge. WinMerge is an open source differencing and merging tool for Windows. It is available in a portable version which I have on a USB PortableApps.com stick. It can compare both folder structures and individual files and also merge files to create duplicate copies. I especially like the portability as I can move it from server to server and remove it when needed without having to install it.
I use it consistently to test configuration files for the various fall-back servers we have. It allows me to check configuration files on the fall back servers with the current production servers to assure that all changes have been applied to both servers. I recently used it in a migration which involved transferring several gigabytes of files from one system to another. We made the initial move by copying the complete library to the new system, then, after several days, had to copy any changes which were made during production operation. The initial copy took 4 hours and we would have had to spend that much time to copy the entire library again had we not had a tool like WinMerge. I set the compare to use date and file size and with a couple of minutes had the list of files to be copied/deleted. I told WinMerge to do the job after checking the files and within 5 minutes had migrated the files.
Get it and keep it in a ZIP file or on a USB drive for use with multiple servers. You won't regret it.
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