Compact description of directory trees

There exist many copies of data stored as directory trees whose consistency we need to verify. In this work we create a new binary format describing directory trees. It allows to record names, hashed contents, and other metadata of the files. In order to verify data consistency, we can compare two such descriptions. This format is designed with focus on its compactness and high read speed. We present a program which builds such description for a given tree and compares two descriptions. In order to maximize speed we use parallelization techniques and tree hashing, taking properties of hard disk drives into account.