Backing up

[johnridley]

I use 1TB drives dropped into an external USB docking stations as removable media including to back up the internal 1TB drive I use to hold family photos and video.

I've been screwing around with a bunch of different sync programs, and I'm never really happy with them. rsync actually works the best but it's kind of a kludge running on Windows.

While looking for a good solution this evening, I finally ran across Microsoft SyncToy. It's what I wanted. It's dirt simple, and it works. Also it installs as a service and keeps an eye on file renames and moves in source folders, so that when you go to sync, it doesn't wind up deleting and re-copying renamed files like all other solutions I've seen; it just repeats the rename over there.

It also runs in 3 modes; sync (changes on either folder will copy to the other), mirror (dest folder made to look exactly like source when run), and I think echo, which means new files and renames move from source to dest, but no files are ever deleted. I might have the names mixed up.

It's got a clean interface, no more than 3 or 4 controls per screen, uncluttered, and it works.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&DisplayLang=en

Comments

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

SyncToy really does work well. I've recommended it to quite a few people as a backup tool.

That said, I do find that robocopy and a .cmd file can sometimes be a bit more flexible, if the need arises.