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Newbie: left to right? RRS feed

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    I'm a "newbie" to SyncToy, so please excuse my ignorance.

    I am trying to understand the "contribute" sync.  I believe that it is the one I should use, but the example doesn't make sense to me.


    Say that I am about to travel somewhere and want to take my files with me.  So, should begin by doing a simple copy of all of my files from the source to my USB drive that I'll take with me, or should I use SyncToy to get my files from my source drive to my USB drive? 

    While I travel, I change files, and, as in your example, I delete somethings to create more room on my USB drive.  Then I come home.  Now, in your example, you have the left copying, etc., to the right, but not the reverse.  I would think it would be just the opposite ... the right to the left.  Isn't the left the original source drive and the right the copy?
     
    What is above is my question.  But now let me describe my situation in more detail, in hopes that I will get a more detailed answer.  If not, that's okay.

    My source files are on a shared net drive.  When my wife and I travel together, but with two laptops, I want to take two USB drives with us that are, at the beginning, both a copy of everything on our home network shared net drive.  (We will be traveling for several months, usually together, but not always.)

    When we get back, I think that what I want to do is sync our two USB drives with each other, and they sync one of them with the net drive.  Would that be that way to do this?

    THANKS IN ADVANCE for the help.  If I can get this to work, it will be a marriage saver!

    Yours,

    gkc

     

    Friday, March 13, 2009 8:34 PM

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    Hi,

    SyncToy a potential marriage saver?  The SyncToy marketing guys (if they existed) would love that. 

    Alright no pressure here, just a MARRIAGE on the line.

    Firstly, to summarize the synctoy help about the different actions:

    Synchronize:  all creates/updates/deletes flow both ways
    Echo: all creates/updates/deletes flow ONE way
    Contribute: all creates/updates flow ONE way

    So you'll have to decide what exactly you want there.

    It sounds like you want to SYNCHRONIZE your two USB drives and then CONTRIBUTE one of those USB drives to your net drive.  That's assuming you don't mind deletes flowing between your two USB drives (if you don't want deletes flowing you'll need 2 contributes between the usb drives).

    And then if you want changes to flow from your net drive to one of your USB drives you'll probably want an ECHO for that.

    So basically you're going need a 2-3 folder pairs for this.

    I hope this helps.  Let me know if you have any questions.

    -Jesse
    Friday, March 13, 2009 9:34 PM
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    Hi, Jesse,

    I have been out-of-pocket for a while. Now I am back to this issue.  Thanks for your reply. 

    This is a really important issue for me, and though maybe not a "marriage saver," if I can get this to work properly and maintain it, it would certainly greatly help us out and would prevent a lot of conflict.  It is understandably very frustrating to my wife when files are not there that she has worked hard on, etc.

    If my question below is beyond the scope of this forum, perhaps we could communicate directly with one another.  This is a problem for which I would be very glad to pay for some help, in order to get this vexing issue resolved. 

    I don't care how the problem gets solved, so, probably it would be best for me to describe the problem, rather than to ask for help with the solution that I think is needed.  After reading the problem, if you could write a step-by-step procedure, I would be most grateful.

    At home we share all of our files on a net drive.  When we travel, sometimes individually and sometimes together, we need to take those files with us.  When traveling we may change some of those files and/or create new ones.  And then when we get back home, we need to have the new and changed files synced with our net drive files.

    Rather than have all of our net drive files put onto the hard drives of our two laptops, I have two USB drives, one for my wife to take and use with her laptop, and one for me. 

    What would be ideal is if we could have those USB drives connected to our system so that they are continually being keep up-to-date (synced) with the files on our net drive, so that the two USB drives are ready-to-go at any time.  Right now my wife uses her laptop even while at home and soon I will be doing the same, so I assume that when we are home we should keep one of the USB drives connected to her laptop and continually being synced with the net drive, and that I should do the same thing with my laptop.

    So, how do we set this up and what kind of syncs do I need to maintain this?  A step-by-step procedure would be really helpful.

    Thanks SO very much in advance.

    Sincerely,


    gkc






    Friday, April 17, 2009 3:37 PM