Hey guys,

let’s look at synchronization tools – all of ‘em from MS, and all are free and very very good:

Microsoft SyncToy (GUI only)

Robocopy (Commandline, additional gui, single threaded copy)

Richcopy (GUI, threaded copy)

SyncToy is the easiest to use and sufficient in 90% of the time… If you want to sync at a defined time. Same for richcopy, which is very performant because you can have multiple threads do the sync. With robocopy you can have an automated synchronziation in nearly realtime (periodically each minute robocopy checks for changes on the source folder and replicates them to the target folder).

Unfortunately, everyone of these tools does not support a real-time two-way synchronization. You don’t think this is necessary? Well – it actually is! And I’ll explain you why…

In my desktop I use a 1000GB drive to store everything – this drive can be called the “lord of data” or simply the master, as all the other drives are just for backup purposes. Okay, lately I bought a external 2.5” 1000GB drive which is connected via USB2. What I want to do now is work on my fast internal 1000GB as usual and – in the background – Iwant to have every change replicated to the USB drive. Well, this is one-way synchronization only, real-time but one-way. Well, you’re right… But I do actually work on files on the USB drive as well, so I do also have to get the changes from the USB drive to the internal one. So – you’ve already guessed it – I need a tool for 2-way real-time synchronization.

And guess what – I think I found one, called Unison. It requires the GTK+ runtime, which you can get here.

I’ll test this in the next weeks and then, maybe, I’m going to write again about it.
Regards,

Daniel

UPDATE: Forget Unison, not usable on Windows. I’m back to SyncToy – which works.