This is an excellent tool, and I applaud those involved in its development. I currently use the tool to gather information from shared network resources into a central location to gather and summarize information from various files. It is great not to have to navigate extensive network paths every 20 minutes!
There are a couple non-critical items that would be beneficial for my particular application of the utility: 1) User-defined use of the SyncToy_*.dat files in the source folders. - While everyone has access to certain public folders, certain people "own" those folders. When these people see the *.dat that are unfamiliar to them, they delete the file (which interferes with the subsequent synchronizations). On shared directories where read-only access is provided, the *.dat file is never created and so there are no worries. I recommend allowing the user to elect to use the *.dat file and describe the consequences of not doing so. Then, the utility can handle the synchronization as though the *.dat file were never created. 2) Allow for a command-line option to add, modify, and delete folders pairs. - When repairing or creating a series of folder pairs, it would be easiest (for me at least) to script the creation of folder pairs as opposed to using the GUI interface repeatedly.
Thanks again for the great work in developing such a useful tool!
1) The .dat files are used to enable the dynamic drive letter assignment feature. If you delete the file then you will have to sync fresh, but it shouldn't break anything.
2) You can do this now. From the help file:
It is also possible to manage folder pairs from the command line. Folder pairs are managed through SyncToy.exe whereas scheduling is performed through SyncToyCmd.exe as described above.
SyncToy does not support running multiple copies of SyncToy.exe at the same time. If SyncToy is already running in in the Task Bar, and a second instance of SyncToy.exe is launched with or without any command line parameters, it will simply bring the already running instance into focus and no errors will be reported.
The parameters associated with SyncToy.exe are described below:
-d(left=, right=, name=,operation=Synchronize|Echo|Contribute, [check=yes|no], excluded=,included=) Creates a new folder pair with the specified options:
left - mandatory, provide absolute path for left folder
right - mandatory, provide absolute path for right folder
name - mandatory, provide name of folder pair
operation - mandatory, specifiy action type for this folder pair
check - optional, specify whether file contents should be checked for file matching, default is no
excluded - optional, specifies exclude filter for files, defaults to none
included - optional, specifies include filter for files, defaults to all
-u Delete one or more folder pairs, no user data will be deleted
-? Display Help
Marked as answer byDeepa ChoundappanWednesday, March 4, 2009 1:15 AM
