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i have a few external hard drives and some duplicates of some of my files on them. some files have unnecessary duplicates while others just get lost because i lose track of their location or i erase them before i make sure about the duplicates. trying to manage them more efficiently is almost impossible without spending too much time playing with the windows explorer. duplication is useful to some extent; e.g. having a mirror of your email messages somewhere in case of accidental deletion, which might simply be deleting an unused thunderbird profile which points at the same directory as your actual profile. another example would be a folder of the music files you carry on your laptop's tiny little hard drive that should also exist on your huge external hard drive just in case. ;)
there are some version control tools that are used by companies and more sophisticated home users. a simpler method that can be helpful would be mirroring or file synchronization.
the basic idea is the contents of two "synchronized" folders are exactly the same and remain the same. if you copy anything to one, the other will also get an exact copy with some exceptions: if the synchronization is offline, the user needs to trigger it. the same thing happens when you delete files from one. there are one-way methods of synchronization which have minor differences in concept.
anyways, i googled file synchronization and checked the results. www.allwaysync.com was the first non-sponsored link.
allwaysync is a freeware closed-source software. so is microsoft synctoy. in addition to them i tested freefilesync and dirsync pro. with all the respect for the open source community the two open source candidates where not comparable to the closed source ones. they did not support multiple synchronization jobs which is the least you would expect from a good synchronization tool.
synctoy, which has an extremely simple interface, missed file modifications (i.e. when i modified a file in one folder it did not update the mirrored file in the synchronized folder) and that is sad because the free allwaysync has a limitation: 20,000 files in 30 days.
i guess i will try to find out if i can make synctoy smarter by changing the settings or to explore if freefilesync has some hidden functionalities.
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