SyncToy 2.1 – Make your life easier!

There are probably 20 or more programs that are used while working on customer computers. Some for antivirus cleaning, spyware repair, and all stuff antimalware. Others are common programs like the Adobe family that needs to be on every computer to save customers from the “What version do I download???” questions the first time they go browsing the web.

Regardless, let it suffice to be said, we have a bunch of stuff that needs to be synced up on a regular basis. And after manually syncing all these files for the last several months and trying to remember which location has the most current – thumbdrive 1,2, or 3 OR the actual archive location, SyncToy 2.1 has popped up.

SyncToy 2.1 is the latest SyncToy (download) release from Microsoft. It’s a free application that seems to suffer none of the “DARN IT, how do I do this?” issues.  A lot of these toys have to be used on a fairly regular basis to remember exactly how to do something. They aren’t always the most user friendly type apps.

SyncToy seems to be pretty friendly and works great.  Just setup your base folder and then your target folder, create a data pair between the two folders and tell it to sync up!

There are a few different options – sync both ways, sync left to right and synch both without deleting. In the first two options, sync is smart enough to know that a file is newer on one side or the other and also catches renames.  Nice.

Must have for anyone that wants to sync their home computer to a thumb drive and then perhaps to a work computer. Of course there ARE online ways of doing this without carrying a thumb drive here and there, but in certain cases (as in virus removals), the last thing you want to have to do is to connect to the internet to get a file.

In our case when we get into computers, we use both thumb drives and CDs. If we think there’s a virus, it’s much safer for us to use a CD to install and run antivirus/antispyware/antimalware utilities.  However you slice it – this little tool is going to make it a LOT easier to have the most recent software available on ALL of our sources!