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SyncToy 2.1 - A very useful and free tool for syncronizing your files
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Thu Feb 25th 2010
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by
Brett
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I have a pretty common problem in my household - my wife and I need to share files, but also have access to them we take our laptops off the network. Up until this point we used Windows Offline files. I created shares on the network for all of our "My" folders (documents/pics/music/etc) and moved the location in our profiles to point to those locations. Windows automatically sets them up as offline folders and syncs the files back and forth. This allowed us to share things like our photos and music.
Unfortunately we are users of iTunes. We are forced to do so because we have iPhones (all though not for long - the 7 series phones look great). For whatever reason iTunes would often lose its database including all the playlists etc. This happened more than once, even after complete system rebuilds. I am not sure why this was the case but I suspect that iTunes just wasn't playing nicely with the behind the scenes sync mechanism that Offline files uses. (It uses a local cache that it will dynamically redirect you too if you become disconnected) Also - because all of our My folders were UNCs there were some applications that didn't like that. (CAS in Visual Studio and Live Movie maker are examples)
Now I could disable the Offline Files and just use network shares, but what I like about the sync is that it also gives me better data redundancy. If my workstation dies I have all my important bits on the server as well as a few other machines. Conversely a down server wont stop me from getting access to my files.
I found a replacement that is built on the Microsoft Sync Framework called SyncToy. SyncToy lets you build folder pairs and perform bi-directional sync between them. You can then schedule a sync via Task Scheduler which will automatically propagate your changes. There are some nice options including Syncro (bidirectional sync), Echo (pushes changes in one direction only), and Contribute (which only pushes add/modify/renames in one direction).
So far so good, but I have only been using it for a few days - I'll update this post after I have lived with it for a little while.
Download SyncToy 2.1 here.
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