Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Best Free Folder Synchronization Utility

Best Free Folder Synchronization Utility This is getting scary. First I recommend Microsoft Defender and now I'm going to recommend another Microsoft product as the best in this category. Well, equal best. It's called SyncToy v1.0 for Windows XP [1] and, as the name implies, is only for XP - SP2. This program is more than a syncing program; it can copy, move, rename, and delete files between any number of folders and even computers. The program operates on the principal of pre-defined folder pairs. You define and name these pairs and then when you want to perform a sync or other task, you recall one of these pairs and carry out the operation. Syncing can be in either direction and covers all options from complete sync to updating newer files only. The handling of files with changed file names is exceptional as is the backup of overwritten files. Overall, pretty well everything you ever wanted in a sync utility. Note that SyncToy requires V1.1 of Microsoft's .NET framework. Also highly recommended is 2brightspark's SyncBack [2]. It works for Windows 98 and later and has a number of features that SyncToy lacks such as the ability to sync to a remote FTP server.
Code:
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E0FC1154-C975-4814-9649- CCE41AF06EB7&displaylang=en (844KB) [2] http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html (1.9MB)

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