Just got a new laptop. I had managed to live without for a couple of years but lately, I’ve been moving across country too often and for long enough periods that I can’t stand the “webdesktop” solution no longer. My PalmV doesn’t quite cut it either… :-/
So here I am, learning to cope with duplicate filesystems again… trying to find the best ways to synchronize all kinds of things between my laptop and desktop. Email, documents, mp3 collection…
Synchronizing can be a pain in the ass, that’s for sure, but on the other hand, it also serves as a pretty efficient backup strategy.
Actually, the only new challenge since my previous laptop is my 15 GB mp3 collection. (It took me weeks to rip all my CDs and tag the files… and I actually gave up halfway :P) I am of course not backing these up on CDs… (I already have the original CDs). But I surely wouldn’t want to loose the rips and have to go through the whole process again! U-(
I pulled a few utilities from download.com and so far the best one I installed seems to be “Advanced Directory Comparison and Synchronization” [Download link dead]. First advantage: it is not written in VB. Second: it does not rely on the windows shell to copy the files… and thus it doesn’t pathetically hang after a few minutes of copying thousands of files…
It did a relatively fast analysis of differences between the “music” directory structures of the laptop and the desktop, found the already matching files (copied by previous tests) and is now proceeding with the sync. There is a real progress indicator (current file and overall).
This is all running over WiFi (that’s another story :-/) and the best thing is that if I break the connection (which always happens sometimes when a sync lasts for hours), the software asks me to retry, skip, skip all etc… The nice thing is: “retry” actually works! ;)
Maybe the interface is a little bit complicated, but I guess I’ll learn to appreciate it when I start to add and remove mp3s on both sides before I sync again!
However, if you guys know of an absolute kick-ass tool for that kind of sync, I’ll sure want to give it a try! :D
Comments from long ago:
Comment from: LolZ
Hi,
maybe you already tryed it and it is not what you are looking for, but I try anyway: why not rsync ( http://rsync.samba.org/ ) ?Works pretty well for me, but I use it between a linux desktop and a mac osx laptop. But I am almost sure this can be done on windows as well.
2003-11-27 23-29
Comment from: François PLANQUE
Well, it’s not what I need here, but I can see it interesting for future uses. Thanx ;)
2003-11-28 00-32
Comment from: Kochise
Menu ‘Commandes\Synchroniser répertoires’
Hop, Bof… (c) Achille Talon
Kochise
2003-12-02 22-08
Comment from: em-brof
SyncEncouraged by a fellow frenchman, I am testing ADCS to analyse and synchronise the content of the various copies of…
2003-12-03 14-51