Final Count: A Painless Last Minute Sanity Check for Your Backups
Every digital tech, photographer, and DIT knows the low key anxiety of wrapping a shoot. You have your master drive, and your backup drive(s) lined up. Before you unmount those disks and hand them off to a client or producer, you need absolute certainty that everything copied perfectly. You can not assume your sync software did it's job, you HAVE to know for sure.
The standard, built-in way to verify this on macOS can be a little tedious. You select your folders on both drives, hit Command + I to pull up the Get Info windows, and wait.
And wait.
Finder is notoriously slow at calculating folder sizes on the fly because it tries to recursively index every deep, nested file in the background. Worse, it can occasionally miscalculate or stall out on massive volume transfers, leaving you staring at fluctuating byte counts while the crew is waiting to pack up. Even when it does load, you are left squinting at two separate windows, trying to manually eyeball file counts to ensure they match.
I built Final Count to make this process quick and painless.
Parity at a Glance
Instead of rigid, two-pane comparison tools or slow Finder windows, Final Count gives you an unlimited multi-column dashboard. You just drag and drop your folders into side by side columns.
The app immediately scans the directories and gives you a per-subfolder breakdown of folder counts, file counts, and total sizes. It's lightweight enough to just have in the background throughout the day or quick enough to open just before you call it a day.
- Instant Mismatch Detection: If a folder matches across your drives, it looks clean. If there is a file count discrepancy, the row highlights in orange. If a folder is missing entirely on one backup, it flags it in red.
- Multi-Drive Comparison: You are not limited to comparing just A versus B. If you are backing up to three or four destinations simultaneously, you can drop them all in side by side.
- Lightweight and Native: It runs quietly in the background, follows your native macOS dark or light mode, and requires zero configuration.
Last Minute Sanity Check
Final Count is not designed to be a heavy syncing tool or a deep data forensic analyzer. It is built to optimize your workflow right at the end of the day. It acts as a fast visual confirmation, a final sanity check, before you clear cards and send drives out the door.
The app is free and fully open source under the GPL v3 license. You can grab the latest release directly on GitHub.
Check out the project here: Final Count on GitHub
