SyncToy

I have been playing with SyncToy over the last few days at home.

There are three computers in my house and regularly a requirement t keep bits of data in sych. This is partly for back-up purposes, but also to keep the network load down a bit; photos and stuff like that. Previously I have built scripts with quite complicated robocopy.exe jobs in them. This has been OK, but it’s not that easy to maintain.

SyncToy fulfill all of my requirements, but there are some bits that aren’t quite there and would lead to problems for others.

There isn’t any real granularity on how files are compared, it really is about synching.

There isn’t any way of doing a recursive synch to make sure everything is in synch. So if you are synching more than one computer you have to run it a few times to get everything into synch.

I liked the ability to select which sub-folders were synched, but I couldn’t see any way of defining the default behaviour for new sub-folders.

The performance across the network seems to be good too, would be very interested to see how Microsoft take it forward as the ability to do block level copies comes into their arsenal elsewhere.

In general though, super little tool – why did it take this long?