While trying to figure out how to best sync my work laptop with the network I’ve come back to a recurring MS tool, SyncToy. Now at version 2.1 it also supports 64but, which is handy for me. The reason I’ve been looking at this is because I work from a laptop but I’m not always connected to the LAN, this means the file shares are not always available to me. However I appreciate my laptop might get lost*stolen*dropped so I don’t want to leave it all on my laptop either. There’s many free and paid for tools out there that I’ve played with at home, but being my work laptop I wanted something simple that didn’t break copyright and scare the IT guys. So I looked at SyncToy again…

The latest version is better than ever with improved features that allow it to recognise removeable drives, even when they’re plugged in and get different drive mappings. However what I wanted was something I could script, ideally at start up/shut down that would sync my files to/from the network. If you’ve the time and patience you might be able to get xcopy to work, but I prefer the easy life. It turns out though that you can run SyncToy from the command line which means I can script it in a batch file (nice and easy!). So here’s what I done:

1. Set up a folder sync using SyncToy GUI
2. Ran the sync to make sure it worked
3. Ran the sync from the command line to make sure it worked
“C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.1\synctoycmd.exe” -r files
** where “files” is the name of the SyncToy pair
4. Created a batch file that I could run the sync and shut down my laptop when I’d finished
“C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.1\synctoycmd.exe” -r customer_files
pause
shutdown -s
** the pause is in there to check it’s done what I think it should

So what this does is give me tool (like the old MS Briefcase) where I can sync my files as I shut down my laptop, really handy when I’m not on the network! Now I work from my laptop and update the network when in the office.