Sync folder on USB with a computer that has restrictions

Question

I use synctoy to sync a folder between my USB drive and my laptop. I want to sync a different folder on my USB drive with a folder on a computer at work but I am unable to install software on it. So i suppose my question is there a portable version of synctoy or a similar program available to use?

Answer 1

I've used DeltaCopy for this with pretty good results. Its based on the open source rsync project. It can be downloaded as a zip that can be extracted and run directly from the USB drive.

Answer 2

My favorite utility is robocopy (part of Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools). You can put the robocopy.exe on the hard drive and make two batch files, one for each machine. The first script will copy from the computer to the hard drive. The second will copy from the hard drive to the computer.

sample robocopy command

e:\robocopy c:\folder e:\folder /mir /z /r:5 /w:5

Assuming that the external drive letter is E. The /mir switch means to mirror. The /z switch means to transfer in restartable mode (so if you want to transfer a 1GB file and stop part of the way through, it will resume where it left off when you rerun the command). The /r switch is how many retries before the file is skipped. The /w switch is how long it should wait before retrying. If the /r and /w switches are omitted the defaults are very large, 1 million retries & 30 seconds per wait. The /? will show the usage.

Answer 3

What is your OS? Under windows, you can creat a briefcase and copy it to the usb disk, then when you need to synchronize the files between the two folder, just click on it then it will be done automatically.