Folder and file synchronisation

Wednesday, 29 October, 2008

As I’ve mentioned before backup is the cornerstone to any serious use of IT and any good backup strategy will involve some form of file/folder synchronisation. My favourite in the past has been Second Copy which works very well and supports FTP sync as well. Microsoft has released the freely available SyncToy whilst here are also some notable releases of the open source (and originally UNIX based) rsync in the form of DeltaCopy and cwRsync. Rsync is particularly clever in that not only does it work out which files have change but has which parts of files have changed and only copying those sections. As a result it is very efficient.

However I recently came across another solution called MirrorFolder which implements a real-time software RAID. Which means changes to files are written as they happen. It actually installs itself at the I/O level and any outputs to files are duplicated and automatically written to a copy. Very nice.

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