How to check which files have been copied to the main hard drive and which ones have not been copied?

Question

I formatted my MacBook main drive some months ago and, in order to not lose data, I created a .dmg image of the hard drive before the formatting procedure and saved it to an external device.

Then, some days ago, I started a kind of data restoring, coping most of the backup files back to the main drive.

Now, I would like to check if all these mentioned files have really been copied back to my Macbook. Due to this, I am looking for an application theoretically able to analyze the files (in particular, their name, hash, etc.) contained in my external drive and find corresponding files on my Macintosh hard drive; if a corresponding file is not found, the file should be highlighted. If a similar application actually exists, can you suggest it to me?

If there is not an application with the features above explained, can you suggest me a brief Bash script or AppleScript able to do that? I'm not familiar with both these languages, but I have a little Batch scripting background and I was thinking about some statements - e.g. the for loop, md5, etc. - which generate a filename plus MD5 checksum list for both drives, and which find correspondances. What about this? Can you suggest me some examples?

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Note: This is not the same as How to confirm that a file has copied to a new disk without any errors?. The new data structure on the main drive is a bit different compared to the previous one, which is stored in the external drive. Due to this, a standard folder/volume comparison with a dry rsync run is not exactly what I am looking for.

Answer 1

Using a bit of Bash and some nice utilities is possible to compare MD5 of every single file. I will assume here that the same MD5 means the same content.

Make MD5 of everything:

find /one/dir -type f | xargs md5 > one.txt
find /other/dir -type f | xargs md5 > other.txt

Compare every MD5 in order to find what is missing where:

diff -u <(cut -d'=' -f2 one.txt | sort) <(cut -d'=' -f2 other.txt | sort) > diff.txt

Only found in /one/dir:

grep -f <(sed -n 's/^- //p' diff.txt) one.txt

Only found in /other/dir:

grep -f <(sed -n 's/^+ //p' diff.txt) other.txt

Let me know if this works.

Answer 2

From my experience I may recommend Path Finder app (http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/).

It has very powerful Commands -> Folder Sync command that does exactly what you are asking for: shows synced files and those you may need to copy left or right. They are highlighted with different color. App has free trial period (fully functional) and then asks for some money, but it's totally worth the price.

Red arrows just show some random directories. You can select your own, including those on different volumes. And you can compare file content is required.