So here’s the command to perform a basic comparison of two folders and write a log file listing the differences. It has a ton of great features such as multi-threaded file copying, selectively copying changed files, and resumable copies that make it a must especially for big file copy jobs over flaky network connections. It is a supercharged version of XCopy that has been included with Windows since Vista. If you are not familiar with RoboCopy, and you do a lot of mass copying of files, you need to stop what you are doing and learn about it pronto. Necessity mothered some invention and I found an inventive way to use a combination of command switches on RoboCopy to perform the comparison. BC was having a lot of trouble and choked on many of my comparisons. However, today I was doing a reconciliation as part of a very large file migration project that required comparing two folders that each contained hundreds of millions of files spread across thousands of sub-folders. It is an excellent utility, and one that I think should be among the first utilities any developer should install on a new machine.

In most cases where I need to compare two folders recursively on a Windows system I use my go-to tool Beyond Compare.

Compare folders windows 10