SyncToy v2.0

[FrgMstr]

This new SyncToy release from Microsoft will surely help out some [H]’ers out there that have a hard time backing up particular types of data, and we damn well know some of you have huge amounts of disk space that could be better managed. Seeing how me and the old lady have our own digital cameras and computers, this sounds like just the thing to keep us in sync with each other’s pictures while providing a duplicate copy on another box.

There are files from all kinds of sources that we want to store and manage. Files are created by our digital cameras, e-mail, cell phones, portable media players, camcorders, PDAs, and laptops. Increasingly, computer users are using different folders, drives, and even different computers (such as a laptop and a desktop) to store, manage, retrieve and view files. Yet managing hundreds or thousands of files is still largely a manual operation. In some cases it is necessary to regularly get copies of files from another location to add to primary location; in other cases there is a need to keep two storage locations exactly in sync. Some users manage files manually, dragging and dropping from one place to another and keeping track of whether the locations are synchronized in their heads. Other users may use two or more applications to provide this functionality.

Now there is an easier way. SyncToy, a free PowerToy for Microsoft Windows, is an easy to use, highly customizable program that helps users to do the heavy lifting involved with the copying, moving, and synchronization of different directories.

 

[Loki008]

I was actually playing with this earlier, but it still has the same issue as version 1.4 had for me a while back, it is a hugh memory hog if you have a large number of smaller files. For most users this will work well dont get me wrong, but i just tried it to sync ~250GB of images and it was up to about 2GB of system memory in use and climbing before i stopped it and went back to my trusty robocopy script.

Like i said, this is a great utility for the average home user and i would strongly recomend it if you have to set it up to back up grandma's my documents folder, but some [H]ard users will find its performance lacking. In that case i would recomend Robocopy GUI if you are looking for something a bit more user friendly than the command line version of robocopy.

 

[FrgMstr]

I was actually playing with this earlier, but it still has the same issue as version 1.4 had for me a while back, it is a hugh memory hog if you have a large number of smaller files. For most users this will work well dont get me wrong, but i just tried it to sync ~250GB of images and it was up to about 2GB of system memory in use and climbing before i stopped it and went back to my trusty robocopy script.

Like i said, this is a great utility for the average home user and i would strongly recomend it if you have to set it up to back up grandma's my documents folder, but some [H]ard users will find its performance lacking. In that case i would recomend Robocopy GUI if you are looking for something a bit more user friendly than the command line version of robocopy.

You should check out the FAQ linked on that page. It talks about it being "slow" when it is first implemented, but after that things smooth out. So you might use it a while longer and see what happens before rendering a final verdict on how the software works out over time. Then again, if there are no features in it for you, then no reason to change.

But I don't think RoboCopy allows the files to SYNC both ways, which of course is the purpose of SyncToy.

 

[Lrdtalon]

I used SyncToy for quite a while, both the 1.4 version and the 2.0 beta. I ran into issues with it and FreeNAS both with iSCSI targets or CIFS/SMB.

 

[lassiterb]

I have used the previous version in the past but the main problem I found with it was that it has a limitation of the length of the path to files. I have many files that are buried rather deeply with long directory names and it won't sync those. Hope they increased the file path length in this new version but I don't see it mentioned in the list of new improvements.

 

[JethroXP]

I've been using the SyncToy 2.0Beta for a while now to do daily syncs of my photos, videos, and music with the shared folders on my Windows Home Server. I use mine in "Contribute" mode, so that anything new it finds on my PC gets added to the share on the WHS, but even if I delete something from my PC, it stays on the WHS. I've got SyncToy running as a scheduled task everynight, so after the initial sync which took hours (for about 150GB that included 30,000+ files), it only takes a couple minutes every time it runs now. Great little app, it really ought to be part of the next version of Windows.

 

[Bigdady92]

I use this app all the time to backup my home dir and other folders on my hd. Initial time for it across my USB storage was relatively 'short' compared to the amount of data (40GB or so). I set it to run at 3am and let it go. If i'm still up at 3am this will give me an excuse to goto bed as I really don't need to be up that late anymore.

Wonderful little app. Highly recommend everyone who needs a small simple app to replicate data to another source just go ahead and use this thing.

 

[Giolon]

I've been using SyncToy 2.0 Beta as my backup tool of choice after my hard drive spontaneously crashed last August. It's a great little app (bonus that it's free), that lets you quickly set up your folder sync pairs and you're ready to go. I love it.

 

[nero2]

Awesome! I've been using synctoy for over two years now and it's nice to see a native x64 version (instead of having to trick the x86 version to work)