Re: SSD TBW

On 8/23/2026 8:47 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Aug 2026 08:47:27 -0700, Don Y wrote:
> 
>> And, its going to magically be able to compare JPGs, executables,
>> .so's, etc?
>>
>> Play with something like Beyond Compare (Windows) and see how
>> helpful file comparison can be.
> 
> Does Beyond Compare do comparisons on arbitrary binary files?

Yes.  If, for example, you have inserted a byte in one, it
will display a "hole" in that location in the other to
show the balance in agreement, though offset, in much the same
way you would compare text that had an inserted line.

If you compare two images, it will show the difference
visually.

It tries to understand the forms of various file types
and tailor its comparison to that type.  It's aware of many
different formats (excel, word, pdf, etc.) and tries
to add value to each presentation -- instead of just
saying "they are different" (or "binary same")

<https://www.scootersoftware.com/home/gallery>
<https://www.scootersoftware.com/home/multifaceted>

Additionally, the sources and destinations can be on remote machines,
accessed via SMB shares, FTP, etc.  So, I can compare the contents of
one FTP server to another on a different host and note the differences
as well as synchronize them.

And, it isn't plagued with the path length problem that Explorer has,
so you can use *it* to drill down deeper than Explorer would otherwise
allow.  This is handy when one of the targets is a UNIX machine
and the other windows.

> On Linux, for example, we can do something like
> 
>      diff -u <(xxd file1) <(xxd file2) | less -iX
> 
> to compare hex dumps.