Tools of the Trade – Beyond Compare

There is a recurring theme in many of the articles on this site and that is the fact that a major portion of our litigation support role relates to dealing with electronic data files. Many of the tools we use help us deal with the data in different ways.

One of the tools that I was introduced to years ago has become one of my favorite tools and I use it almost every day. The software is called Beyond Compare and it is not a free tool, however, it is a reasonably priced per user license.

Although Beyond Compare has many features, the two primary reasons I use it are (1) to make sure that I have copied all of the data from one location to another or (2) to compare two folder structures for differences. The software displays the folders and files in a visual way that makes it very easy to compare two folders and identify the differences between them. There are filters that can be applied to easily see the differences and there is a color scheme as well.

Have you ever started a data copy of a large amount of data and then something happened that caused the copy process to stop before it was finished and you were not sure where it left off? Beyond Compare makes it easy to resume your copy process right where it left off because you can visually compare the two folder structures.

Here is a link to the software features. I have only purchased the Standard version. I have used the Text Compare features too.