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Does anybody know a Windows tool for detecting completely or partially identical folders? For example, some files are identical, but one folder contains newer versions of other files. This tool should at least show pairs of identical folders. Both free and non-free solutions are acceptable

It takes too much time to solve such task using "classic" duplicate file finders.

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    Do you want to scan the disk? What exactly defines partially identical folders? What output do you want in the case of completely or partially identical folders? What are you willing to pay? Does the software have to do anything with the results, other than displaying them? Please edit your question.
    – user416
    Commented May 17, 2016 at 15:22
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    @JanDoggen definition of partially identical folders already given: "For example, some files are identical, but one folder contains newer versions of other files"
    – Schullz
    Commented May 17, 2016 at 15:24
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    Related: Gratis Windows tool to find similar, but not identical directories
    – Mawg
    Commented Jan 30, 2021 at 19:10

2 Answers 2

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Your requirement seems to be bit blurry but you can achieve the task listed (like same folders with certain files updated to newer version), I would suggest to look at Beyond Compare tool.

It is paid version but it has a feature called Folder compare which exactly does what you are looking for.

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While I totally agree with & upvoted the accepted answer (upvote), here are a few gratis alternatives:

WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle.

enter image description here

You can also choose a tree view of the same information: enter image description here

Kdiff3

KDiff3 is a diff and merge program that
•compares or merges two or three text input files or directories,
•shows the differences line by line and character by character (!),
•provides an automatic merge-facility and
•an integrated editor for comfortable solving of merge-conflicts,
•supports Unicode, UTF-8 and other codecs, autodetection via byte-order-mark "BOM"
•supports KIO on KDE (allows accessing ftp, sftp, fish, smb etc.),
•Printing of differences,
•Manual alignment of lines,
•Automatic merging of version control history ($Log$),
•and has an intuitive graphical user interface.
•Windows-Explorer integration Diff-Ext-for-KDiff3 - shell extension included in installer (originally by Sergey Zorin: see also Diff Ext)
•KDE-Konqueror/Dolphin service menu plugin
•Simplified integration with IBM-Rational-Clearcase for Windows

Supported platforms: •KDE4
•Any Un*x that is supported by the Qt-libs from qt-project.org,
•MS-Windows.
•Apple Mac OSX binary available. (0.9.98)
•In theory any platform for which Qt-libs work (Qt4 or Qt5).

enter image description here

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    I already use WinMerge and didn't know I could use it as a file compare tool, without having to view the contents of each file. I was able to use this to compare two large backup folders and quickly weed out duplicate folders.
    – Ben
    Commented Jan 2, 2021 at 16:12
  • Glad to have been of help ;-)
    – Mawg
    Commented Jan 3, 2021 at 9:09

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