Review: WinXP’s SyncToy v1.2
I’ve done my spring cleaning today and managed to finally set up my external hard drive. My big brother put together an awesome combination of Maxtor’s 200 GB hard drive with an inexpensive case. So now I have this great space to finally backup my great collection of music, photos, videos, work files and whatever else is mulling around in this machine. Besides manually copying files from my desktop to the external drive, I still want a great backup utility.
My first application to test is Window XP’s SyncToy v1.2 which is a free download from Microsoft. I’m already familiar with their TweakUI, Alt+Tab Replacement and ClearType Tuner.
SyncToy’s features that interested me:
Very simple UI
Easy to set up folder pairs
Ability to copy, move and syncronize files
I wasn’t looking for much really, just something to backup what I needed. Installation was a breeze, it didn’t even need to reboot so I can get right into backing up. SyncToy works by creating folder pairs and syncronizing them from the “Left” location to the “Right” location. Clear enough. After I’ve got all my pairs set up and I ran them all once to get it all started. Once completed, I had a brief moment of satisfaction. It didn’t last long because I was already thinking of the next time and I certainly didn’t want to have to run this all again manually.
Though SyncToy didn’t have a built-in autosync, there was a way to schedule the SyncToy to run all pairs or individual pairs. That little bit is actually available within the program’s help menu. However, after following the tutorial I couldn’t make it work for me. I was running the scheduled task and it just opened SyncToy without actually running the backup pairs.
Another con is that I can not change the location of the folder pairs. I will have to create new pairs which seems time consuming if I wanted to back up files to a new location.
Altogether, SyncToy ran smoothly and easy to use but it didn’t have the automatic feature I wanted. It’d be great if I could set it and forget it.