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If you work with distributed environments like the ALUI portal even a little bit, chances are you’re constantly shuffling files from one place to another or comparing the contents of different folders. For years now I’ve relied on this little gem called Beyond Compare. It’s inexpensive shareware and worth every penny. At its core, it’s a fully comprehensive file comparison tool, allowing you to diff files and folders, even between servers or over FTP. So in the example below I’m looking at some code in my local code repository and comparing it to code on my FTP server. Items in black mean they’re already synch’ed so they don’t need to be uploaded again, which is really useful when transferring huge files.

In fact, when transferring a bunch of huge files like VMWare images, I almost always use Beyond Compare, since if there’s a failure somewhere Windows copy will just give up and you have to figure out where to start with another transfer anyway.

So whether you’re comparing code between development and production servers, portal configuration settings between production server, or transferring large groups of files, Beyond Compare is a must-have for any developer or system administrator’s toolkit!