Comparing Files (to verify backup)
What's a good tool or technique for comparing all the files in directory X to all the files in directory Y?
I wrote backup scripts (in PERL) which compare file attributes (size, date, etc.) but not file contents (which takes too long with audio files to be practical). If files' attributes differ, then the differing backup is renamed and then replaced with the new master file. It's been working great for years, except...
Last night I had disk errors and today I noticed file corruptions. The file attributes don't change, but the contents did (one of my wavs has a spike in it which wasn't there before). My PERL script is blind to the file contents, which means I'm no longer sure I'm creating "perfect" backups. What I'd like is a way to make sure the *contents* of one tree of files exactly matches the contents of another tree.
Ideas?
I've tried:
1) fc (xp command line util) -- easy to use, but requires me to write scripts for traversing directory trees (since it isn't recursive)
2) DirPrudence -- if there's a way to prevent the GUI from appearing *at all*, and *if* the $15 isn't just for a single PC (I have several), I might register it
Are there other ways to make sure our files aren't getting corrupted without us knowing it?
Travis