cmurray.org

Recents events appear to signify that air travellers hoping to carry laptops onto airplanes are soon out of luck. While this indeed is a hardship and inconvenience, it does open the door for exploring alternative means for storing and retreiving data and documents. Business commuters already rely on thumb drives and increasingly can take advantage of such web-based tools as Foldera and countless other storage solutions. Indeed, the corporate intranet/extranet also could be used for this purpose. Security obviously is a key component to such tools.

I have a similar but different situation to solve. I work pretty much exclusively on my laptop. All my data and documentation lives here, as well as all my music, video, and photos of family and trips. It is inconventient and time-consuming to copy all these files and directories over to my desktop PC or onto a volume of my Linux host. What I need is a file synchronization method to update changes made to pre-defined directories on the laptop to these other systems. I understand that Microsoft offers Robocopy for this purpose but it appears that this tool is available only with the Windows Server system.

I did some poking around and found a wonderful solution in File SyncForce, a file synchronization and versioning tool from ObjectForce Software. Using this tool, I choose a source directory on my laptop (say D:\music\*.*) and a destination directory on my desktop (again, D:\music\). I can choose either a full copy blast of the directory or set the preferences to update only those directories that have changes or are otherwise different. In addition, I can let the program run in the background and either synchronize real-time changes or set a parameter to synch at specified intervals. I currently am synching to my desktop because I want the files available there but could just as easily set up a Samba server on my Linux host and map that drive for backups as well.

As addendum to this post, I just was made aware of a Microsoft product called SyncToy. It does require the .NET 1.1 Framework be installed on the machine, however, this is a far easier and more useful tool than the one I described above. The interface is simpler and cleaner and also provides options like synchronize, echo, subscribe, combine, all of which allow a variety of directions and methods to move your files. I don’t see the ability to schedule runs, but then again that’s not something I care to do (I imagine there is a way to use the task scheduler in Windows if I so choose to).