Long back I have written some articles on why having a backup of your data from your computer or blog is necessary and how to take a backup data in Windows XP or Vista, backup important mails and backup blog data. It’s much easier to backup when you have an external hard drive if your data volume is very huge or a USB drive with space of around 2GB to 4GB. Also when you take the backup copy, it’s much easier to sync rather than copy the whole data. This saves a lot of time and also the life time of USB drive or the external drive.
So how to sync data and folders between windows Vista and USB or external drive for free?
There are lots of good syncing software out in the market which comes with a cost but here are some good sync software which are free for personal use. The default sync feature of Windows Vista, Sync Center is also a very good sync tool. However it allows only syncing files and folders between offline contents to a server or another computer and does not allow to sync with external drives and USB drive. But Sync Center also allows syncing music files between Vista PC and external drives and music players with USB drive.
The two free sync software which I came across to be good and free are Allway Sync and GoodSync. Both are very easy to use and allow bidirectional sync, selective file sync, file type independent, automated synchronization and lots of other features. Also they allow jobs to be preset and can be run every time when you need to synchronize.
Download Allway Sync or GoodSync
So how to use these sync tool to synchronize folders and files?
Allway Sync
GoodSync
There will be two sections where you select the folders you would like to sync. It doesn’t matter where you place the FROM folder and TO folder. Click the browse button to select the folders and make sure you select the sync directions which is placed in between the two folder selectors. Then click the Analyze button at the bottom and you can see the result which lists the files and folders which are different between the selected folders. You can individually sync the files in GoodSync if you don’t want to sync all the files in the result or you can individually set the condition for sync in Allway Sync by adjusting the Sync direction. Finally click the Sync button to synchronize files and folders between computer and external drive or USB drive.
In comparison of the both, Allway Sync has a better interface and usability but GoodSync displays lot of relevant details about the files and folders in the interface.
Microsoft also has SyncToy for XP and has recently released a version for Vista.
@dt, Thanks for mentioning…SyncToy looks good too…
I’ve used Allway Sync in the past and found that it works very well and would certainly recommend that to anyone looking for an easy way of syncing things such as USB memory sticks.
Whenever I go thru the word “backup”, I need to mention here a very good and old software, Norton Ghost 2003 - I have written briefly about that here. I will write about that in detail… Its a must try for everyone…
I really like the Allway n’go version. You can install it on your external drive, and every time you connect, it starts it up.
This saves you one more programm running in the background all the time.
Even though I must say the interface is a bit hard to master at first. Especially I do not understand why one cannot choose multiple folders at once…