shahine.com/omar/

Twitter

About

Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.

Total Posts: 1176
This Year: 0
This Month: 0
This Week: 0
Comments: 3715

Disclaimer
The posts on this weblog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.

E-mail

Thursday, August 04, 2005

« International Atomic Energy Agency | Main | Steve Lombardi is funny »

SyncToy

At long last, a decent free sync utility. Man I can’t tell you how excited I am about this. With 4 or so computers it’s a pain to have my photos, music etc on all of them. Today I use a very ad-hoc process.

No more! SyncToy rocks. I used it last night to sync 100 GB of WMA files from my desktop to my Media Center in “echo” mode. I love all the different modes it supports like subscribe, echo etc. Meets all my needs. I plan on using it at work to sync all my spec documents with our SharePoint server for offline access and some level of redundancy.

My only complaint with the product is that you cannot type in UNC paths to select folders, you need to browse your network, and there is no command line support. Hopefully these will be resolved in the final version.

I really have to end it to the Windows team. Between this PowerToy and the RAW Thumbnail PowerToy I’ve gotten two awesome upgrades to XP for free.

There is also a good white paper on SyncToy which is worth reading.

Software

Posted Thursday, August 04, 2005 Permalink Comments [7] View blog reactions

Tracked by:
"Microsoft SyncToy v1 Beta" (Technically Speaking) [Trackback]
"Microsoft SyncToy v1 Beta" (Technically Speaking) [Trackback]
"The Mobile Minute 108" (Nino.Mobile) [Trackback]

Thursday, August 04, 2005 1:18:37 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

Have you looked at Beyond Compare?

http://www.beyondcompare.com

Only $30, and it does every kind of compare/sync you can imagine-- not only for files and folders, but for file diffs as well. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Jeff Atwood

Thursday, August 04, 2005 1:19:14 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

sorry:

http://www.scootersoftware.com/

that other link, uh, doesn't work :P

Jeff Atwood

Thursday, August 04, 2005 7:32:17 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

I loved the concept, but it hung on me while transferring files, then refused to cancel. This was after several crashes where it simply went *poof* without any trace of an error. And now since I had to install .NET 2.0 to get it to run, IIS is giving me fits (IIS errors *on the desktop*, out of memory, etc.) *sigh*. Next on my list is a little utility called sync (http://www.codeproject.com/vb/net/sync.asp).

Richard Tallent

Friday, August 05, 2005 6:35:35 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

I thought SyncToy is alright, but can't beat the auto syncing that is part of the current sync tool I use, Allway Sync. The latest beat has some funky Scheduling as well as the auto syncing (including When device is connected, every X mins or so many mins after the last file change happened).

Check out my review at:
http://mollyzine-podcasting.blogspot.com/2005/08/allway-sync-perfect-sync-tool-for.html

HTH
Molly