At the recent Christchurch Codecamp 2008, Mat Veloso mentioned SyncToy as part of his session on “SQL2008 for developers”. It helps you copy, move, rename, and delete files between folders and computers quickly and easily. This is great for backup and for the whole laptop/desktop worker scenarios.
It was originally developed for professional photographers to sync their photos in confidence. It is built using the Microsoft Synchronisation Framework, which in terms of SQL Server, has the same features as Merge Replication. However, what the framework does is to abstract those same features and allow them to be applied to ‘providers’ other than SQL Server. In this case, the provider is the file system! To get an idea how this was developed, take a look at the white paper “Introducing Microsoft Sync Framework: Sync Services for File Systems”.
Well worth a look! Download SyncToy 2.0 from here.
