I have lost my hard disc and had to start afresh. Luckily, I do have good backup but I'm now faced with a daunting task and I wonder if anyone has an easy solution.

Basically, I need to check the files I have restored on my computer with all the files I have on my web server (and I have 5 web sites). I know I've updated things since I did the backup (yes, I didn't do it often enough) but I need a way to compare the files on the server with the fileson my hard disc to see what has been updated, which pages have I added but now need to recover from the server. I'm sure you get the idea.

So please, has anyone got an easy solution. I can do it the hard way - file by file by eye - but I'd rather have a piece of software do the hard work and give me a report.

Why compare? Just download and use what's on the server. Unless you are saying you have made recent changed that weren't uploaded.

http://winmerge.org/

Another good way (unless your server or computer have glitchy time/date stamps is to check there. Usually the latest one was the most recently updated. That's much faster than checking files line by line. This way you will know which is the newest and if you do find discrepancies that you need to know what the change is you can always do the line by line then. There are a few programs out there that are really good for this, I have one that I really like, let me see if I can dig it up and I'll post it when I find it lol.

Ok here's the one I was looking for, I haven't reinstalled it since my change to Windows 7 so took a few minutes to find it lol. Hope it helps, it's pretty nice and easy to use

http://winmerge.org/

WOW, great find.