Software to Merge Two D: drives?

Hi,

As a result of a disk failure and my recovery atempts I now have half of the
data from my D: drive on one backup drive, and the other half on another.

The thing is, it's not a case of having directories a,b,c on one and d,e,f,
on the other.

For example:

d:\photos\holiday will exiasit on both drives and with different files in
each.

Is there any programme that will merge the 2 backup images into one good
image on a third drive? Ideally, it would verify the readability of the data
too - especially where the same files exist on both backups (and ideally
pick the non-corrupted copy, if one copy of the file is bad)

Cheers,

Fred.

Previously Fred Finisterre wrote:
Hi,

As a result of a disk failure and my recovery atempts I now have half of the
data from my D: drive on one backup drive, and the other half on another.

The thing is, it's not a case of having directories a,b,c on one and d,e,f,
on the other.

For example:

d:\photos\holiday will exiasit on both drives and with different files in
each.

Is there any programme that will merge the 2 backup images into one good
image on a third drive? Ideally, it would verify the readability of the data
too - especially where the same files exist on both backups (and ideally
pick the non-corrupted copy, if one copy of the file is bad)

I don't think there is an automated way to tell whether a file is
corrupt, since you will not get physical reead errors on the backups.
What I would do is copy them together with (x)xcopy or the
like (just copy with subdirectories from both sources into one
target directory) and then manyally check all the files that are
in both backup disks.

As to find the duplicate files: If you tell the program that
you use to copy the files together the option not to overwrite
existing targets but to complain instead, you should get a list
of error messages listing all the duplicate files. Not sure
whether (x)xcopy supports this.

Some Perl or other scription could also do this quite handily.

Arno
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"Michael Cecil" wrote in message news
On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 13:28:37 -0000, "Fred Finisterre" wrote:

Hi,

As a result of a disk failure and my recovery atempts I now have half of the
data from my D: drive on one backup drive, and the other half on another.

The thing is, it's not a case of having directories a,b,c on one and d,e,f,
on the other.

For example:

d:\photos\holiday will exiasit on both drives and with different files in
each.

Is there any programme that will merge the 2 backup images into one good
image on a third drive? Ideally, it would verify the readability of the data
too - especially where the same files exist on both backups (and ideally
pick the non-corrupted copy, if one copy of the file is bad)

Cheers,

Fred.

You could just eliminate the dupes using a program like FindDupes or even
something like Beyond Compare (in CRC mode).

The actual duplicates aren't the problem unless they exist under different names.

Then you wouldn't have a problem just copying the files into one folder since
they wouldn't be overwriting one another.

The "dupe"s aren't the problem, it's the same name "diff"s that are.
Copying a duplicate over another obviously doesn't loose you anything except
the copy which is what you actually want.
Copying a "diff" over the same name file looses the copied-over file.

Not sure how you could check them for corruption
though without a third good copy.

If they're all just pictures you could
probably visually do that with some graphics program's thumbnail mode but
it would take some effort depending on how many images there are.

Use ACDSee to copy/merge picture files from the one drive to the other drive.
When it encounters same name files it offers options to replace, rename or
delete (on both paths) while showing both pictures next to each other.
I think Zvi Netiv has a program that can make a new file out of two where one
is allowed to choose which difference part will be incorporated in the new file.

On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 13:28:37 -0000, "Fred Finisterre"
wrote:

snip

Is there any programme that will merge the 2 backup images into one good
image on a third drive? Ideally, it would verify the readability of the data
too - especially where the same files exist on both backups (and ideally
pick the non-corrupted copy, if one copy of the file is bad)

Cheers,

Fred.


try UniqueFiler
now located @:
http://www.uniquefiler.com/

it will read the images in the directories and find duplicates you can
delete. It works quite well for images because it actually examines
what the images look like and groups them together based on visual
similarity. You can use this tool therefore to not only delete true
duplicates but to locate corrupted versions of images & lower quality
versions of images. A program that will try to "merge" the two
directories fully automatically is not advisable.