> On Mar 2, 2026, at 14:32, Dale <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 3/2/26 8:17 AM, Grant Edwards wrote: >>> On 2026-03-02, Dale <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> I was hoping I could do a whole directory not each individual file. >> Do you only want to know if the _directory_ has changed and not if the >> contents of any file has changed? That's possible, but it might >> require a small C program: I can't think of existing utility that does >> that. > > What I was hoping, I could tell it to generate a checksum for a entire > directory, the way it does for a file. Then I do the same thing on my main > version and see if my main version matches the backup version. I think that > even if this could be done, it would take days to generate it. I was hoping > for something that takes less than a hour at least, maybe even 15 or 20 > minutes. I'm getting the idea that what I'm wanting could take days or > longer to perform. 42TBs of data is a lot to check. Some 64,000 files.
Well, inherently, in order to checksum all the data, you have to read all the data - every byte of every file. Putting all the files in a directory doesn't change that. If your CPU is reasonable, this will likely be disk bound. Are your disks fast enough to read 42 TB in 15 minutes?
