New trial user: How-to question

[purpleplume]

Hi,

First, an apology to admins/mods: I just posted a similar question in Beyond Help, and then realized that that thread is only for v. 2.

I downloaded the v.3 trial tonight, and am hoping it will enable me to do some file maintenance. I'm posting here to see if someone could suggest the best way to go about doing my task.

In preparation for taking a PC to Apple to have them transfer files to a user's new Mac, I am tidying up the source PC. This XP Pro user has never utilized Microsoft's default folders such as My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, etc., preferring a complex nested folder system that has meaning only to this particular user. Consequently, the PC has, for example, 20,000+ JPEG files scatted across dozens of file paths.

What I'd like to do with BC is a side-by-side comparison of, say, all *.jpg files on the PC's drive with all jpg files that currently show in the Win default My Pictures folder (there are a few thousand jpg files there, probably < 10% of the total jpgs on the PC).

Then I would like to use BC to copy, say, all the jpgs on the entire system into My Pictures. That way the user can retain the original files in the locations that make sense to him, while allowing the Apple folks access to all jpgs via My Pictures.

This process would then be applied to consolidate all the file types the Apple folks are looking for into the standard Win folders: My Documents, My Music, etc.

I'd appreciate some input on how to best accomplish this with BC. I had a look at the Folder Compare panes, but am not sure how to approach this.

Many thanks.

[Zoë]

You could do this by loading the C:\ as the base directory, and putting *.jpg;*.jpeg in the "Filters" edit. After thant use Edit->Expand All to open expand the entire directory structure, then Edit->Select All files, then Actions->Copy to Folder to copy them to My Pictures. I'd strongly suggest using either "Keep relative folder structure" or "Keep base folder structure" though. Using "Don't keep folder structure" would flatten everything, resulting in a single directory that will probably contain 10s of thousands of files.