Creating Delta Diff Patches of large Binary Files in C#

Question

I looking for a way to create Delta Diff Patches of Large Binary Files (VMWare Virtual Disk Files). Is there an implementation in C# or any useful methods in the the .NET Framew

Answer 1

There's nothing built into the framework to do this.

You're going to have to look for 3rd party solutions, commercial or free, or write your own.

A common algorithm is the VCDiff algorithm, which is used by quite a large number of products.

Answer 2

Here's a C# class that implements Meyers O(ND) Difference Algorithm:

http://www.mathertel.de/Diff/default.aspx

Enjoy!

Answer 3

bsdiff was designed to create very small patches for binary files.

As stated on its page, it requires max(17*n,9*n+m)+O(1) bytes of memory and runs in O((n+m) log n) time (where n is the size of the old file and m is the size of the new file), so it will take a long time and use a huge amount of memory to create diffs for virtual disk files.

The original implementation is in C, but a C# port is described here and available here.