CheckSummer
May 2, 2020⚑AppsBackupUtilityI'm planning to write about my file backup strategy in details, because I always enjoy reading about how other people manage their backups, and I'm surely not alone with this passion. But before I would do so, I released one of the utilities I developed and use in my backup workflow.
CheckSummer is a command line utility capable of creating a checksum file with the list of MD5 hashes for a chosen directory, optionally recursively for the whole structure, or it can validate the files listed in an existing checksum file, by comparing their current state to the previously created MD5 hash. By this I can spot if a file is missing or whether its contents changed. Since this is used in the context of creating backups, its main purpose to detect bit rot that might happen after a while. This is a possibility on hard disks, flash media or perhaps on incorrectly read optical discs – some bits flip and the file still has the original length, but its content is no longer valid. Images and video get artifacts, compressed files break, text files get modified. By checking the checksum of files, this can be detected and a previous, correct version of the file can be restored from backup.
The utility can be set up in its .config file to run in Automated mode (use the config value true) so it won't need any input parameters and it either creates a new checksum file with recursive file processing, or validates them using the checksum file, depending on whether the checksum.txt file exists in the target directory. And if there is no target directory specified, it processes the current directory, so in most cases I just have to type checksummer and the desired action happens.
Download it from the Apps page!
Platform: Windows (.Net Framework 4.8), mac OS / Linux (Mono)