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Compare by "Content" includes date check?

Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2011 6:15 am
by LanaiLizard
I'm not sure if this is technically a bug but the behavior is not what I expected or wanted.

I am using V3.5.1699 of Scnchronize It on Windows 7. The files being compared are all the same size but are slightly different with different file dates. I did a Preview using an action of "Backup" and "Compare by Content" with the Source files having a later date than the Target files. This resulted in all the files being tagged to overwrite the Target files as I was expecting. The newer files should overwrite the older slightly different files.

But when I flipped the Source and Target file compare such that the source files were older than the target files I got the window that states that "No files were found to synchronize!". So nothing was tagged to be copied even though the files are different.

I understand not wanting to overwrite a "newer" file in most cases but in this case I set the "Compare by" field to "Content" which I thought would ignored the dates on the files during the comparison, but it doesn't. I would have thought a "Backup" using Compare by "Content" should tag any files that are different for copying from the Source to the Target regardless of the dates on the files. It should just use the file's contents to determine whether they are the same or not.

I realize the desired behavior can get tricky at times under various combination of options and maybe I haven't thought through all the details but this doesn't seem right on the surface because it makes you think the files are the same when they are not.

Thoughts?

Re: Compare by "Content" includes date check?

Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2011 8:30 am
by grigsoft
Hello,
"Compare by Content" does actually ignore dates, but only when deciding if files are actually same. But if files are different, date is used anyway to decide which way to suggest copying this file. There is just no other information we can use. Or am I missing something?

Re: Compare by "Content" includes date check?

Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2011 11:45 am
by LanaiLizard
Ok, I see. I really should have used the Action of "Duplicate" (not Backup), along with the Compare by Content, to achieve my desired goal of finding any files that were different regardless of the date on the files. Any differences found with Duplicate would be pushed from the source to the target, regardless of the date.

It just seemed natural at first that "Compare by Content" would ignore the date always and therefore Action would determine the direction of the copy since the date was being ignored by the "Compare by Content". I had lost sight of the two-step process ("Compare by" followed by "Action") with Action always being based on date.

I had rarely used Duplicate before (and probably never had the target files newer than the source before either so had not stumbled across this particluar case) but I see now I should be using Duplicate pretty much every time I use Compare by Content to make sure I have a perfect copy of something.

Thanks for clearing this up for me!