Useful software - synctoy

Synctoy is a really useful piece of free software from Microsoft, and I never thought I would use all of those words together in the same sentence. I have a laptop here which I use to manage my photographs, music files, Internet access, lesson plans and materials and anything else which needs a PC.

I also have a Linksys NSLU2 which is a tiny Linux-based NAS/fileserver device which takes two external USB disks and can export their filesystems using SAMBA . The server can be configured to perform nightly backups from one hard disk to the other, giving a poor man's RAID. There is a thriving Linux development community for the NSLU2, which has ported all kinds of Linux software, but so far I just use it as a fileserver.

I run weekly backups from the laptop to a directory on the fileserver using Norton Ghost, but I also needed to mirror my laptop home directory to a directory on the fileserver. This was the first task which led me to look for file synchronisation software.

So far I have been very pleased with synctoy, it has a preview mode which lets me see the difference in content between two directory trees without modifying them. It also lets me synchronise a directory tree from the fileserver to a directly-attached USB disk on the laptop to give me an additional level of backup of irreplacable files such as pictures and lesson materials which I have created.