Joseph L. Casale wrote:
I need to verify some directories of backed up data versus restored data. What would you recommend as the type of comparison to do, and which tool would give the easiest/most usable output?
Diff works if they are on the same machine. On different machines you can: rsync -avn -essh local-dir user@remote_host:/path/above_dir
The -a option says to recurse and take all possible attributes, -v says show the file names, and -n says don't actually do it (be careful not to omit that..). This will give you a list of filenames that have some difference between local_dir and the remote copy. If you add a --delete it will also show anything that exists in the remote but not the local side (and be especially careful not to omit the -n in this case).