Re: Directory synchronization

["Douglas Handy" <dhandy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff,

Sure!  As long as it will work on W2k Server . . .


I hadn't heard of SyncToy, so was just reading about it. According to their
documentation, it hasn't been tested on anything but XP.  From the docs:

  "The following hardware and software requirements are necessary to use
this software:

*Operating System. *Windows XP Home or Professional (including Tablet PC and
Media Center Editions) with Service Pack 2 or later installed. This program
has not been tested on any other version of Windows. "

That of course does not mean it can't work on W2K server, only that it isn't
tested on it.  SyncToy looks especially useful in how it handles file
renames.  But if that is not a concern, you can see any of a whole genre of
other software for syncronizing stuff.  The one I use is called SyncBackSE
from http://www.2brightsparks.com/ and it has served me well.  It seems to
copy files much faster than Windows Explorer (which always seemed slow to
me) but more importantly can copy open and locked files too, if you have
administrator access rights..  That can be useful for periodic automated
backups or sync operations while you still have applications such as email
or whatever running.  (Oops, just rechecked the docs and copying open/locked
files requires the source computer to be either XP or Win 2003, on a local
NTFS volume.  W2K does not support the operations needed to read the files
even while locked.)  You can define though a list of programs which should
be closed prior to the operation.  And you can define programs to run before
or after the operation with max wait times, etc.

For unattended operations, you can use the Windows scheduler (for date/time
dependent runs), or set profiles to run on a variety of different
situations:

 - Every x seconds / minutes / hours, etc
 - When a device is attached (eg, insert a USB flash drive and have sync
operations kicked off automatically)
 - On Windows startup or shutdown/logoff
 - Run externally from command line, batch file, etc

It is highly configurable in terms of what to copy and how to handle
collisions.  You can have it email logs of the operations, useful if you
have it running on a server.

Doug