HDD GURU FORUMS

Hi,

Some DR softwares are not optimal in the possibilities offered to save files.
Hence, a synchronization software is sometimes much useful for postprocessing.

I have been using Unison on Windows, which offers good manual control over which file should be copied, and the possibility to copy/edit text files to create new synchronization projects. However, Unison is not optimal when there are a lot of subfolders to synchronize as it doesn't offer a folder tree view and doesn't give much feedback about when a synchronization will take end. Furthermore, Unison was often quite hard to install before I found the good version of the GTK+ runtime.

I'm looking for a software offering a folder tree view, a checkbox for each subfolder, the possibility to use the Shift and Ctrl keys to select multiple folders / files, synchronized navigation (like in WinSCP or FileZilla), offering flexible copying/mergins options (like "Replace only if newer", "Replace only if different size", "Replace only if different size and newer", a.s.o.).
So, the quality of the GUI matters.

It would be nice if the software doesn't freeze when a drive becomes unresponsive and allows to reconnect a drive (eg. basing on its serial number).
The possibility to (auto-)save which was already synchronized would be nice too.

The synchronization software I'm looking for is not for backup needs, but for daily data recovery purposes.
Should at least work on Windows. Multi-OS softwares also welcome.

Thank you for your suggestions.

From the screenshots I could see, FreeFileSync looks great: http://www.freefilesync.org/

Anyone using it ?

Other suggestions ?

Not exactly a software solution, but I love my Synology cloud station synchronization. It works just like Dropbox but I can set any folders I want as sync folders, they are backed up and versioned on the NAS, as well as synced on any other computers I want. Plus all the cool features like being able to right click a file or folder and create a sharing link I can email someone.

data-medics wrote:Not exactly a software solution, but I love my Synology cloud station synchronization. It works just like Dropbox but I can set any folders I want as sync folders, they are backed up and versioned on the NAS, as well as synced on any other computers I want. Plus all the cool features like being able to right click a file or folder and create a sharing link I can email someone.

I use something similar to this, called owncloud. It's also usefull to "right click and share" and can be protected with passwords, and it's extremely cheap.

You could use this in a FileZilla client, and you would have the tree view, replace files etc etc with this combo!

Thank you.

The software I mentioned above (FreeFileSync) matched my needs and I'm very satisfied with it.
It doesn't display folder trees, but when comparing two folders, there is a small window showing you how much percent of each subfolder is synchronized.

It doesn't handle well unresponsive hard drives, but it is a general issue with many non-hardware tools. What I do in case of a freeze is to manually power off and on the dock with the faulty hard drive and start the comparison again. FreeFileSync allows to exclude uncopiable files using filters ; this can take some time but works fine.