Software to make a list of all files & folders on a disk with file hashes

Question

Lately one of my hard drives died.

I managed to save some of the data before the event because of S.M.A.R.T. and CrystalDiskInfo which showed about 2k reallocated sectors.

Now I have about 6 TB of data and not even half of that to make a full backup.

Since most of the files are available on the internet, I decided to backup only files that are not (private) or are important.

In the event that one of my HDDs dies again, it would be nice to have a list of files that I accumulated over time since I will definitely forget many of them.

So which programs can make a list of files and folders?

Some of the features that the program I like to have are:

1. Recursive scanning so I can point to a folder as input
2. Save metadata like size and checksum

I could never be sure of the files that I have saved that they have not been corrupted. That's why this time I want to also compute and save the hash for each file.

The size seems redundant if you have the hash, but if I have to download them again I can only check the hash only after the file is completely downloaded.

Files with hashes allows me to check over time the files are starting to get corrupted.

Until now I found:

• CHK Checksum Utility which unfortunately doesn't save the size, even that is shown in interface and can't compare files with saved list

• ExactFile which does everything that I want except the file size

Are there any other programs that can do this?

I'm using Windows 7 x64.

Answer 1

Also I havn't used it in a long time, HashCheck Shell Extension should do the trick.

For a picture is worth a thousand words,

Answer 2

I am not sure if I got a complete understand of what you want, but I think this should work for you.

NirSoft's HashMyFiles - http://nirsoft.net/utils/hash_my_files.html

• Tiny, lean and fast hashing application
• Allows you to traverse through folders and entire disks
• Wild card filtering
• Create a list of variety of hashes e.g. MD5, SHA1, SHA256 etc.
• Shows output in clear GUI with grid and odd/ even row marking
• Can save output to variety of file types e.g. Tad Delimited, CSV, XML etc.

HashMyFiles is a small utility that allows you to generate unique file identifiers (hashes) using a variety of different popular tools. File hashes can be submitted easily via the tool to VirusTotal for malware analysis.

Formats supported include CRC32, MD5, SHA1, 256, 384 and 512. The various hashing information can be saved to a report (text/html/xml) that includes name, path, dates, file size, version, and other info.

Detailed Evaluation by someone: http://www.mnhs.org/preserve/records/legislativerecords/carol/docs_pdfs/HashMyFilesEvaluation.pdf

Screenshot from the Portable Freeware Collection - http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=1535

They have a huge bunch of amazing tools at NirSoft - First toolset that I put on a new machine.

NirSoft's "SearchMyFiles" Apps has an amazing 'in-built' duplicates checker.