This article was written on August 24, 2010 by CyberNet.
We’ve covered all kinds of backup utilities on the site, but the one covered in this article is hands-down one of my favorites. Synchronicity is free, open source, and available in a portable format. After you fire it up the first time you’ll probably be shocked that something laid out this nicely only uses 215KB on your hard drive… I know I was.
Setting up your first profile consists of filling out the information in the screenshot above, and after that you can go on to schedule the task if it’s something you want to run on a regular basis. Here are all the different things Synchronicity is capable of:
- Fully customizable synchronization and backup, including:
- Limited synchronization: synchronize some folders only, or synchronize folders contents without synchronizing subfolders.
- Full regexp support for files inclusion/exclusion
- 3 synchronization methods:
- Mirror
- One-way incremental
- Two-ways incremental
- File hashing
- Full scheduling support (daily, weekly, monthly, at a particular time, etc.)
- Support for multiple profiles
- Fully portable: settings are stored in a single config file
- By-volume-label paths: Create Synchronicity can backup directly to “My Usb”\Documents for example, by automagically locating the “My Usb” drive.
- Advanced features:
- File hashing, various comparison options
- Time offsets, to compensate for wrong DST settings
- Loose timing: allow file time to differ by a few seconds
- Multiple file systems support (all the ones supported by Windows)
- Native support for UCN (network) and relative paths
- Proxy support for updates check.
- For command line addicts: support for command-line arguments, allowing you to queue profiles, run silently, with optional preview display.
If you haven’t tried out Synchronicity then I highly recommend that you do. It’s not as full-featured as something like SyncBack (e.g. this doesn’t include FTP support), but it includes a lot of the features most people will need… plus some.
Synchronicity Homepage (Freeware/Portable; Windows only)
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