Sumo Consulting^2.0

When I am on the road, I use my laptop, when I am home I prefer to use my dual screen desktop. Over time this has created a little bit of a problem for me with similar but not identical sets of client files on both my laptop and my desktop. I'm not talking about code, I use SVN for synchronizing code. I'm talking about things like requirements documents, technical docs, PDFs of invoices, timesheets, and the like. These are things I could put in SVN I guess, but I would prefer not to.

So what to do? I use to copy files back and forth manually. I considered using RSync, but that requires quite a bit of fiddling to get it working. I wanted a nice native windows program that would be super easy to setup and maintain. After a little bit of searching, I found a Microsoft program called SyncToy

SyncToy may be old news for some, but I hadn't seen it before and it was the perfect answer to my needs. SyncToy will sync up files between any number of computers, handles two way and one way syncs, and also manages folder and file renames. If about 10 minutes I had it setup and syncing folders between my laptop and desktop, merging common directories and making sure all the files I needed were in both spots.

After I installed it, I found it was also handy for managing my photos. I frequently take photos on trips and offload them nightly onto my laptop using it's SD reader. By the time I get home from a trip there are a bunch of photos to move over to my long term storage location on my desktop. Sometimes I don't move them for weeks till I think of it and have time. With SyncToy I can do a one way sync from the laptop to the desktop, moving only the new photos over and leaving me with the option of deleting the pics from the laptop whenever I want.

You can run the syncs manually, or you can schedule the syncs (instructions are in the help). I'm sure I will find more uses for it over time, but it's quite a neat little app and (except for the cost of the OS it runs on) it's free!

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