From the author: in reply to jodawi

Jodawi:
resulting in two folders that should be merged but which won't be, both incomplete

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Directory Report has the capability of comparing and synchronizing two directories. In any screen select any two folders, right click and select: compare directories or select: compare directories (with subdirectories)

Jodawi:
Directory Report in theory helps with this problem. You can choose a source folder A as a filter, search for duplicates in another folder B, and only duplicates in B of files in A should be shown. You can delete these duplicates, leaving A alone.

However, Directory Report does this: my source folder A has a file in it that is 0 bytes. Directory B has a subfolder Bsub which also contains files of 0 bytes -- and many other files which are not duplicates. Directory Report shows me folder Bsub, listing the folder size as 0 bytes, and the folder size including subfolders as 0 bytes, with 6 files total

Reply:

This is the purpose of this function. You are using your source folder A as a filter. Thus only files with are duplicates of these files will be shown. There can easily be other files which are not duplicates which will not be shown. Thus you should be mindful of this and NOT think that the resultant directories only have the files that are shown.

This is very similar to a user scanning with a filter *.jpg. A directory might only have 1 jpg file but many other files. The user must remember that they are using a filter.

If you are not sure how many files are really in a directory then: select it, right click and select: send to MS-Explorer. This will display the directory in the MS-Explorer

Jodawi:

For example, the File menu has a menu item, "Check for streams". What does this do? No idea. Help doesn't mention it.

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The help file has a separate page titled: Streams.

Jodawi:
The compare options are equally lacking. If I click the checkboxes to compare by file name and size, is that doing an OR operation or an AND operation?

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The newest version 33 has been changed to add the words "AND" after each method of finding duplicate files. So it would be finding duplicate files based on the same size AND same Name

Jodawi
If an AND, then you're only deleting files which have the same name AND the same size

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Find duplicates by the same name and size is very fast. The user can then select files in the resultant duplicate list, right click and select: Diff (binary mode) or select: Diff (line mode).

This would be tedious for a very large list, but is perfect for checking the top largest duplicate files

Directory Report is safe since it never deletes any files automatically. The user must decide which files to delete.

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Directory Report is simple to use since it looks just like the MS-Explorer (tree control on the left - List of file on the right)

Directory Report is enterprise ready since it can scan over 7 million files

Directory Report is a tru WYSIWYG tool. Everything you see on the screen can be printed to a printer to saved to a file

When it comes to finding and deleting duplicate files and folders, the most important and fundamental thing is safety. It should be very difficult to delete irreplaceable files which are not duplicates. This means making the application bug-free, and making the interface and search results very easy to understand. Directory Report fails completely on both fronts.

A common problem with duplicate file finders is that they don't treat folders intelligently - if you have two identical folders with a thousand files in each, instead of telling you "these two folders are duplicates of each other", they just show you two thousand duplicate files. Multiply this by thousands of folders and managing the search results becomes a nightmare. Instead of deleting a duplicate folder, you might find yourself deleting half of the duplicates in one folder, and half in the other, resulting in two folders that should be merged but which won't be, both incomplete.

Directory Report in theory helps with this problem. You can choose a source folder A as a filter, search for duplicates in another folder B, and only duplicates in B of files in A should be shown. You can delete these duplicates, leaving A alone.

However, Directory Report does this: my source folder A has a file in it that is 0 bytes. Directory B has a subfolder Bsub which also contains files of 0 bytes -- and many other files which are not duplicates. Directory Report shows me folder Bsub, listing the folder size as 0 bytes, and the folder size including subfolders as 0 bytes, with 6 files total.

Might as well just have it delete folder Bsub, right? It looks like it has only 6 files, all of them of zero size. Right-click and delete - heck, even speed things up by bypassing the recycle bin and permanently deleting them.

Except you're not deleting 6 files, you're also deleting all non-duplicate files in each folder, none of which you can see in Directory Report's "Duplicate Directories" window. (If you switch to the "Duplicate Files" window, which you might not know to do as a new user, you'll get more info.) It seems that if there are *any* duplicate files in a folder, the *entire* folder gets selected as a duplicate, and you've may permanently lose irreplaceable files. At the minimum, the name of this window should be changed to something like "Directories Containing Duplicate Files".

The interface is also rather confusing, and the help lacking. For example, the File menu has a menu item, "Check for streams". What does this do? No idea. Help doesn't mention it. Selecting it results in nothing visible. Perhaps it does something with special operating system files that aren't really files?

The compare options are equally lacking. If I click the checkboxes to compare by file name and size, is that doing an OR operation or an AND operation? If it's an OR, then you might inadvertently delete non-duplicate files which happen to have the same name OR the same size. If an AND, then you're only deleting files which have the same name AND the same size. (Which is still a bad idea, but may be good enough for some who don't want to spend the time to do a proper byte-by-byte comparison.)

With enough time and experimentation I might be able to get Directory Report to do some useful things correctly, but given my initial impression I don't think I'll ever trust anything made by this publisher.