I was scrolling through my RSS Feeds this morning and saw a great article from the Technet Magazine. It is a “Utility Spotlight” article on SyncToy. Working in an education environment where students and staff for that matter are always coming to out office to get their computers re imaged or fixed for some other reason and when you ask them have they got a backup of their documents the standard response is “NO, Can’t you do that for me?”.

After having a play around with SyncToy I have found that this could be a cool little utility for alot of my users. It is a simple, easy to setup and install peice of software that will work on either XP or Vista. It works by having “Folder Pairs”, a Left Folder and a Right Folder. You can setup different Folder Pairs as well. For example I might want to create a folder pair for just my Photo’s and copy them to a specific network location, then I might have another folder pair for my documents and so on.

Let’s go ahead and create a Folder Pair, first of all start up SyncToy. You will then see the Welcome to SyncToy Screen:

Then Click the link in RED that says “Create New Folder Pair” and the Create New Folder Pair dialog box will appear:

On the Left Folder, browse to the folder on your local computer that you want copied and in the Right Folder, browse to the location you want to copy the files to, in my case it will be the Users Home Directory (H Drive). Then you will be presented with 3 Options:

Syncronize: New and Updated Files are copied BOTH ways, Renames and Deletes are repeated on both sides.
Echo: New and UIpdate Files are copied from Left to Right, Renames and Deletes on the left are repeated on the Right.
Contribute: new and Updated Files on the Left are Copied to the Right, renames on the left are repeated on the right NO DELETIONS

After you click Next, give your New Folder Pair a name and click Finish. You can know click the RUN Button on the bottom right hand side and SyncToy will do it’s thing.

As you can see it is Very Easy to install and setup up, great for those users who have trouble backing up their files !