Thank you in advance and I apologize if this makes no sense or if Ive left out critical info. What have you folks used to accomplish this? A free utility would be great, but Im not opposed to paying a little as well.

I tried using the 'diff' command, but the system says it doesnt know that command. The original folder and my external drive are on a Win Sever 2003 system. Hopefully, with this list, he will be able to pinpoint the files he deleted and Ill pull them off the restored folder. Im looking for a utility or command that can compare these two huge folders and give me a list of only the differences in the two. Now I need to compare what I restored to the external drive to the actual folder that lives on the server. What Ive done so far is restore this 40GB folder to an external drive.

He did know the folder name (with tons of subfolders) that the files lived in. The President of our company deleted a bunch of critical files but he does not know the file names but wants me to restore them.yay me.

Winmerge compare missing