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Windows XP: I would like to auto synchronize files between a a local drive and a network drive.

I am aware of Windows Briefcase but it is very slow and I have to tell it to synchronize. I really like the way Dropbox does there synchronization as it is almost instantaneous. It is very impressive. I would just use Dropbox but I cannot install it on the remote machine. Is there some tool or script I can create that will watch a particular folder for any changes and then sync those changes to the networked drive automatically and nearly instantaneously?

CLARIFICATION:

I would like this tool/script to to be a daemon that starts when windows starts and continually monitors a folder for any changes to its contents. Once it observes changes in the source or the destination it synchronizes the files that changed (Very similar to the way Dropbox works). I have a good idea about how I would do this in a Perl script and if a tool does not exist that does this I will write it myself in Perl. If someone has already done this can they share the script?

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Has anyone tried allways sync? – stephenmm Dec 14 '10 at 19:54
Dsynchronize seems like it does exactly what I want. It is free but if it works well I will donate some denaro to Dimio (and his cat :)! The reviews from this site seem good but they do mention that the "real time synchronization" takes more resources than Halo! So, I will have to try it out and see if it is really that bad. – stephenmm Dec 15 '10 at 20:59
freefilesync seems to be another well regarded tool but there are less reviews of this tool so I think I will probably try Dsynchronize first. – stephenmm Dec 15 '10 at 21:13
Bad news. Dsynchronize didn't synchronize when I tried to do bidirectional real-time sync and freefilesync does not do bidirectional real-time sync. So I am still looking for a working solution. – stephenmm Dec 16 '10 at 3:22
I think a script (pick your favorite modern scripting language) will be your best bet if you're comfortable with it. There might even be a nice library/script for this on CPAN. – Roy Tinker Nov 18 '11 at 2:08
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4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Robocopy will do the job.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&familyid=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd

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note that the download link is a family of files for Windows Server...Robocopy is included in the suite. – studiohack♦ Dec 14 '10 at 18:53
Maybe I missed it but robocopy seems like I must manually invoke the command. I was looking for a daemon to watch a folder and auto-update for me. I have updated the original question to clarify what I am looking for. Thanks. – stephenmm Dec 14 '10 at 19:50
You can call Robocopy on startup from a batch file, with the commands\options to do what you need. – joeqwerty Dec 15 '10 at 0:35
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up vote 1 down vote

It seems Dsynchronize does real-time backup to FTP, but I haven't tried it myself. The download on its author's page seems to be down at the moment, but there are other sites that host the file. http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/

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Seems like it does exactly what I need. I will try it out. – stephenmm Dec 15 '10 at 21:22
Ah it seems that you've Googled up a few more... good luck testing! I just looked for "real-time synchronize ftp". – Cerberus Dec 15 '10 at 21:28
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up vote 0 down vote

SyncToy is better than Briefcase, but is not automatic...it is fairly fast and offers some nice syncing options, and works well on network drives...

Free, by Microsoft.

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up vote 0 down vote

You should try the Offline Files feature.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/mobility/learnmore/offlinefiles.mspx

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