That's true, meld is designed for comparing directories which already have similar structures. It seems like what we're looking for is content-addressable stor

That's true, meld is designed for comparing directories which already have similar structures. It seems like what we're looking for is content-addressable storage [1]. The theory behind it appears to be based on Merkle trees and cryptographic signatures [2]. IPFS already has an implementation [3] of this, and there are other implementations (borgbackup, restic, zpaq) listed in that link and in the content-addressable storage article. Disclaimer: I haven't used any of these yet, just found them a few minutes ago. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage [2] https://gist.github.com/mafintosh/464bb8f1451f22c9e5c5 https://gist.github.com/mafintosh/464bb8f1451f22c9e5c5 [3] https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/ipfs-and-file-deduplication/4674 https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/ipfs-and-file-deduplication/4674