Renam mes and delet the left arere epeated right ere

Synchronization Software:
Synctoy Revisited

by M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP
Professor of Information Assurance & Statistics School of Business & Management
Norwich University, Northfield VT

E Echo: "New a and updated files are cop pied left to ri ight. Renam mes and delet te on the left t are

re epeated on th he right." He ere, left mean ns the source e and right m means the de estination.

Figure 2. SyncToy File O Options.

Run-time e options< l ink to 922_f figure_3 > in nclude

which subfold ders are to b e synchroniz zed in any p arent folder. .

"A Active for ru un all" mean ns that a parti icular synch hronization p pair is autom matically sele ected

in n addition to name, size and date to d determine if f two files are e identical."

Figure 3. . SyncToy Run--Time Options.

The “All Folders Pairs” display< link to 922_figure_4 > lets the user select whatever pairs are suitable for a specific synchronization; those pairs marked as "Active for run all" are
automatically checked. Right-clicking anywhere in the window brings up three useful options: “Check all” to activate all pairs
“Uncheck All" to turn all of the pairs off
"Toggle All Checks" which converts each checkbox to its opposite.

Running SyncToy when the target disk is unavailable can cause silent conversion of the source and target pairs to become identical. For example, I have occasionally discovered that a pair such as “drive1:/source_directory & drive2:/target_directory” had been converted to “drive1:/source_directory & drive1:/target_directory” at some point without an error message. As a result, running the standard SyncToy pairs without examining each one to see that it is correct can result in failure to synchronize the intended
directories. Because I rely on synchronization to be sure that I can work on the same data regardless of which system I am using, this bug caused confusion, mistakes, and embarrassment if I tried to show students in class an updated PowerPoint and found it out of date or even missing. As explained above, one way to fix this error is to delete the damage pairs and re-create them from scratch. An alternative is to retrieve a backup of the SyncToy pairs from the local application data folder (on Windows 7, that’s < C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\SyncToy\2.0\SyncToyDirePairs.bin > where username is a variable string with your own user identifier.

The program sometimes creates copies of files by adding the string “.1.” to the name of the original. For example, one can find files called “this_is_the_original.docx” and “this_is_the_original.1.docx” in a directory. On some occasions, I have found hundreds of duplicated files on the destination disk, all of which I had to locate and delete. The problem is exacerbated when one discovers legitimate files ending in “.1.” The mixture of legitimate and spurious “.1.” files forces careful analysis of what to delete.

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M. E. Kabay,< mailto:mekabay@gmail.com > PhD, CISSP-ISSMP, specializes in security and operations management consulting services and teaching. He is Chief Technical Officer of Adaptive Cyber Security Instruments, Inc.< http://acsi-cybersa.com/ > and Professor of Information Assurance< http://norwich.edu/academics/business/infoAssurance/index.html > & Statistics< http://www.mekabay.com/courses/academic/norwich/qm213/index.htm > in the School of Business and Management< http://norwich.edu/academics/business/faculty.html > at Norwich University.< http://www.norwich.edu > Visit his Website for white papers and course materials.< http://www.mekabay.com/ >