Windows 7: Syncing a tree between desktop and notebook (both Windows 7)

A colleague told me that he used to sync his notebook with his desktop PC
by syncing a tree (in explorer?) and he was able to tell the sync to exclude
files below a ceratin directory (to reduce the amount of files being synced).
That was under Windows XP.

Now, he says, in Windows 7, he doesn't have this feature to stop at a certain directory level (depth).



Besides this I wonder by which means he is doing that sync? Is such possible with using shares, does Windows explorer have such a feature?

--
Christoph

It sounds like SyncToy would do what you want. I use it often.

Download: SyncToy 2.1 - Microsoft Download Center - Download Details

Thanks a lot for the idea. I'm gathering more information to post here from my colleague, whether he was an external tool or Windows explorer built-in features which escape me for the moment whether there are such.

--
Christoph

I now got the full information of what is going on:

You have a network drive on your notebook, say:

pointing to some server in the company network.

You can right click on the folder "office" it and tick the menu item
"Immer offline verfügbar" (always available offline).

Then some mechanism creates a shadow copy of that server contents to your notebook.

Now you do not alwayswant to carry around all the data say from 2007-2010.
For that purpose you were able to right click under Windows XP to tick off
the respective folder to exclude it from the syncronisation.

This seems no longer possible under Windows 7.

The optional menu item ("Immer offline verfügbar") always is greyed out.

Any clues how to enable it nonetheless?
(or better said: to get back the Windows XP functionality, that allowed for excluding subdirectories from the synchronisation process?)


--
Christoph

I also looked at that toy. It has the drawback (though being free and from MS), that you have to create a folder pair, that is, on your target system you have to choose a
different directory and possible existing references to a certain drive letter or sth.

--
Christoph