snapdiff compares two snapshots of a directory tree, captured at different points in time. (Think of a "snapshot" as a backup of the original directory tree, in the sense of a full copy.) That way, it gives a high-level insight into how the directory tree has evolved over time.

Learn more in this blog post.

Say, you want to compare two snapshots, one taken at 2023年09月01日, and another one taken at 2023年10月01日:

$ snapdiff 2023年09月01日/ 2023年10月01日/
 FILES BYTES
 G M K B
TOTAL Snap 1 87,243 98,407,188,994
 Snap 2 87,319 98,591,738,372
 
OF WHICH Identical 87,134 97,551,550,976
 Moved 38 134,217,728
 Added 87 234,881,024
 Deleted 11 50,331,648
 Modified 147 671,088,644 (+282,172)

The categories are defined as:

• Identical: both snapshots contain a file at the same path with the same contents.
• Moved: both snapshots contain a file with the same contents, but at different paths.
• Added: the second snapshot contains a file whose path or contents is not present in the first snapshot.
• Deleted: the first snapshot contains a file whose path or contents is not present in the second snapshot.
• Modified: both snapshots contain a file at the same path, but with different contents.

Note: the files count doesn’t include folders.

snapdiff
 [--report PATH]
 [--include-dot-paths]
 [--include-symlinks]
 [--workers N] OR [--workers N1:N2]
 [--no-color]
 SNAP1 SNAP2

Run snapdiff --help for all details.

Prerequisites: Rust toolchain (see Cargo.toml for required version).

Compile via cargo build --release. (Produces binary to target/release/snapdiff.)

snapdiff was created by Jan Heuermann. The sources are available under the terms of the MIT license.