Windows 7: What is the best way to synchronise data files on Win7

Hi

What it the best way to synchonise data between two computers?

BACKGROUND
I used to have a thing called FolderMatch on my WindowsXP machines. It worked pretty well and you could choose whether to copy bi-directionally, or make location B become like A or vice-versa. It was good at showing what it was about to do too, in an intelligable way.

From memory it cost me about 30 dollars (??) a few years ago to get it. The irritating thing was that (ironically) the one thing it failed to actually synchronise was *foldernames* (i.e. folder structures).

This had the irritating effect that if you deleted a whole folder computer A, when you synchronised your data the files in that folder would (correctly) disappear on computer B, but the empty folder would be left behind.

Cheers


Ship

P.S. I dont really want to spend any more money but in any case, from what I can see FolderMatch may not have a Windows7 version yet!

Hello Ship,

You could use the Offline Files feature in Windows 7 to keep the files synced.

Offline Files - Make Files or Folders Available Offline

Hope this helps,
Shawn

I personally never used offline files (I don't run a Microsoft network), so here's the list of other options, that come to mind.

There is a pretty powerful software, Araxis Merge, that can compare and synch files and folders, but it's not cheap and requires lots of resources.

There is also Microsoft SyncToy (I think the current version is 2.1), it's free, works across the network, and works on Windows 7.

Finally, Unix systems have a lot of tools for synchronizing - rsync, diff, etc. One can have lots of these and more running on Windows using the Cygwin emulation engine - works well, provides lots of useful capabilities.

I use FolderMatch with Win 7, syncing data between Win 7 machines and between Win 7 and XP. It does have the "leave an empty folder behind" bug, but otherwise works well

Synctoy is my weapon of choice.

For paid apps, AllSync is has got way way more options.

Clunkfish - but I bought my Foldermatch 7 years ago (I just checked! version 3.5.6 for £21 - far too much money, btw, if you ask me).... Don't tell me after all this time they've never fixed the damned thing!
Have you ever written to them?


Ship
P.S. What version of Foldermatch are you running?

I'm only on 3.4.8! They invited me to purchase an upgrade to 3.5 but I declined . I'm gobsmacked that 3.5 doesn't have the empty folder bugfix. I have never written to them; in actual fact the empty folders aren't too much of a problem because most of the time my changes are incremental rather than structural, so I don't get very many of them to clutter things up.

It's true it's quite a lot for what isn't much more than fancy front end for DOS-based commands, but on the other hand I have used it every day since I bought it, and have come to rely on it for all my syncing needs.

I am using synctoy with mapped drives and that works beautifully

With mapped drives, I use Offline Files...