Using SyncToy 2.1 to Synchronise two external hard drives in Windows

[Mark]

Using SyncToy 2.1 to Synchronise two external hard drives in Windows

SyncToy 2.1 is a free application that synchronises files and folders between locations. Version: 2.1 Date Published: 11/24/2009

System requirements
Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003

Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0
1GHz CPU
512MB RAM

More information and download
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/det...x?id=15155


In this example I'm syncing two external USB hard drives, both attached to a Windows 2003 server. The way this is set up is that the Y:\ drive is shared on the network but is synced locally with the Z drive.


Steps

• Go to the link above, download SyncToy and run through the installer.
  

• Open SyncToy and Create a New Folder Pair
  

• In my example I'm syncing the root of two disks, not folders, but it works the same.
  

• There are 3 options available, Syncronize, Echo and Contribute. A short explanation is next to each one when you click.
  Syncronize basically keeps both of the disks the same, like a RAID 1.
  

• Click change options and Untick "Save overwritten files in the Recycle Bin" and tick "Exclude system files"
  

• Click Preview at the bottom to see what will happen when you run the sync.
  

• The error you see there was because it was trying to copy System Volume Information, (hence ticking exclude system files above)
  

• Now to automate the sync. Open Task Scheduler / Scheduled Tasks.
  

• Make a new daily task.
  

• In the end, I ended up making a one liner batch script and just pointed task scheduler to run it.
  

• See the script here. I've also set it so that the output of the sync will be saved in to a file called log.txt in the program files folder of SyncToy.
  

• If you've set the task to run every 12 hours, I've told it to stop after 11 hours if it hasn't finished. I later changed this to 11 hours, 50 mins.
  

• Here's what's in the log file. This will change with each sync.
  

I had to do something like this because you cannot RAID 1 external USB drives.. It works surprisingly well.

[Zacharius]

Great guide!I've wondered how to do that for quite some time now!