Hands on: Taking the pain out of backup

Synctoy operates by first defining left and right folders. The left folder houses the original copy of the data, while the right is the destination, which could be on a backup drive or a laptop. You can then choose between a number of syncing rules for transferring data from left to right or back again.

Synctoy offers five synchronisation options, and I’ll quote directly from the Microsoft white paper: “Synchronize: New and updated files are copied both ways; renames and deletes on either side are repeated on the other. Echo: New and updated files are copied left to right; renames and deletes on the left are repeated on the right. Subscribe: Updated files on the right are copied to the left if the file name already exists on the left. Contribute: New and updated files are copied left to right; renames on the left are repeated on the right and there’s no deletions. Combine: New and updated files are copied both ways; nothing happens to renamed and deleted files.”

Echo is the most appropriate for backing up data, as it copies new and updated files from left to right and any renames or deletes on the left are reflected on the right. I created a duplicate copy of my Documents folder which contained 8,361 files in 511 folders and occupied 1,091,070,509 bytes on the disk. I defined this as the left folder, and created a new folder on an external hard disk as the right. The external drive was a Seagate Freeagent Go with 160GB capacity and a USB interface.

Synctoy performed the Echo on this folder in just under five minutes and I was eager to compare the duplicate against the original. All the files and folders appeared to be present, but checking the properties of the backup revealed it actually contained 8,342 files in 470 folders, and occupied 1,084,580,719 bytes on the removable drive. That’s 19 missing files and 41 missing folders - several megabytes of lost data.

It appeared Synctoy had ignored empty folders - things like unused ‘My Deliveries’ and ‘My Ebooks’ folders, created by test software. So it was no big deal not to include them, but I didn’t track down all the missing items, which made me nervous.

To test the syncing, I deleted one of the empty folders on the left side and re-ran the utility. It took about a minute to scan the folder and Synctoy correctly identified the required changes. Unfortunately though it didn’t do anything about them. Despite deleting the folder on the left side, it was still very much present on the right after syncing.

I then tried renaming a folder on the left side. Synctoy correctly created a new folder on the right with the new name and containing the old contents, but then failed to delete the now empty original folder on the right. File renames were handled correctly, but the renaming of folders will gradually leave an increasing number of empty folders on the right side, which you’ll need to manually delete.

We’ve also heard of problems where Synctoy wouldn’t sync very long file names, or those which included the tilde (~) symbol, although to be fair, this wasn’t a problem when we tried.

Either way, the inability to sync empty folders or handle folder renames is a deal breaker for us and, although Synctoy is free, I wouldn’t trust it for critical backups. Maybe the upcoming version 2.0 will be better.

Super shareware
Feeling that commercial software was probably the answer, I searched through the various shareware sites to find a popular alternative to Synctoy. There were certainly many options, but one that consistently earned high ratings was Super Flexible File Synchroniser, or SFFS for short. The Professional edition costs around £30 from Super Flexible, where you’ll also find a 30-day trial.

SFFS also started by defining left and right folder pairs, although FTP options allowed either (or both) to be in remote locations, including Amazon’s S3 online storage facility. As you proceed through the six-step process you can define the type and direction of the syncing, including options for handling file deletions or exclusions.