Saturday, September 27, 2008

SyncToy 2.0

Backup solutions for windows over a network are somewhat limited. You could pay for a program to do it. You could use a free program and be stuck with a proprietary format. Or you could manually copy files over. None of these options are great. Microsoft SyncToy attempts to solve these problems.

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You can create pairs of folders to sync, and syncing can happen to any network, local, or external drive. The sync process identifies changes, and applies them on the other side:

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The process is fairly quick even over a wireless network, and does not introduce much overhead over just manually copying the data.

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(Above:The three syncing options, sync, echo, and contribute)

There are three main options for syncing, sync, echo, and contribute. Sync looks for changes between the locations and applies them in both directions. Echo looks for changes on the left(usually your local computer) and applies them on the right. Contribute is echo without deletes and renames.

Scheduling is easy with the windows task scheduler. File types and files matching certain criteria can be excluded. Overwritten or removed files can be kept in the recycle bin. Jobs can be previewed before being run. The best part is, its free. Available here.

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