[gentoo-user] md5sum for directories?

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

Hi there,

I'm in the habit of backing up customer data by booting from knoppix,  
connecting a portable hard-drive and copying with `cp -rvf`.

When this has finished I connect the portable hard-drive to my  
desktop machine, copy the directory of data from it to my homedir,  
and make a zip file of the directory.

I've done this loads in the past, and never been aware of any file  
corruption, but I guess I'm just paranoid today. Perhaps I shouldn't  
use the -v flags during my copy - it's reassuring to see the files  
being copied, but what if I overlooked a bunch of errors in the  
middle of all those thousands of "copied successfully" confirmations?  
What if something has gone wrong during one of the two copies?

So my question is:

Is there any way to check the integrity of copied directories, to be  
sure that none of the files or sub-directories in them have become  
damaged during transfer? I'm thinking of something like md5sum for  
directories.


It occurred to me that one could run `find . -type f -exec md5sum \{}  
\; > file.txt` on both machines and diff the outputs, but some of  
these directories contain many thousands of files, and I'd imagine  
that mdsumming of all these could take some time.

Does anyone have any suggestions, please?

Stroller.
  
   
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