i was wondering, would it be possible to use a piece of software (not raid as i really cba to set that up) which would allow me to keep 2 folders syncronised on different harddrives.

e.g. to back up my music, instead of having the manualy copy my new music into the backup folder, having software automaticaly synchronise the two folders.

I use a free program from Microsoft called robocopy.exe. It synchronizes the files and replaces any that have changed. I use it to sync music between my server and my media center every night so I don't have to load my wireless network while I am listening to music.

The software comes in a Pack by Microsoft for Windows Server 2003, but it also works on XP and robocopy.exe seems to be included in Vista, so you don;t need to download it if you have Vista. Download the Pack from Here on Microsoft's website, then create a batch file that you run whenever you want to sync. I downloaded these instructions from a website, but I am unable to find the website I go them from, otherwise I would give them credit:

Quote:

Yeah, robocopy. It's part of the Windows Server 2003 resource kit (but works just fine in XP and 2000). What you want to look into is the /MIR option. This will create an extact mirror of the target folder on the destination folder\drive. I use a batch file that looks like this to sync the content of a folder on my hard drive with an SD card: robocopy.exe "g:\Smartphone Mirror" l:\ /mir /xd "Program Files" "SmartphoneNotes" In the example above, the source folder is "Smartphone Mirror" and the destination is L:, although it could be "L:\Smartphone Backup" or even \\server\share. The XD switch excludes directories from synchronization, thus "Program Files and "SmartPhoneNotes" are excluded from robocopying. I dunno if you can make robocopy run "on demand" (i.e. whenever content changes in a folder), but it's super-easy to make it run every x minutes\days\months with Task Scheduler via batch file. I've been using a robocopy batch file to copy .BKF files from my Exchange server to my local box for two years now and it hasn't screwed up once.

Then I use Windows Scheduler to run the batch file every night to sync the music.

augie wrote:

Arstechnica

There it is! Thanks!

hmm, i tried that but it doesnt seem to work. i thought maybe it was my command was wrong, so could someone have a look at it please?

robocopy.exe "C:\Documents and Settings\Jack\Desktop\test 2 " C:\Documents and Settings\Jack\Desktop\test 1 /mir


and i saved it as a .bat file

Try this:
robocopy.exe "C:\Documents and Settings\Jack\Desktop\test 2" "C:\Documents and Settings\Jack\Desktop\test 1" /mir

Make sure that the first folder is your source folder and your second folder is your destination folder.

thanks :D that worked.

thats a really usefull program.