Microsoft SyncToy 2.1 is a cool and powerful tool develop by Microsoft Company to sync two folders for backup purpose. It is a free to download PowerToy tool for Microsoft Windows. Sometimes, when you need to copy new files to certain directories or external hard disk for backup, you will need to have tool like this to make your life easier. What you need to do it set the sync folders and click the run button. Everytime when you add new files to a folder, it will show you what files are added, deleted or changed.

You can also customize files that are created by our digital cameras, e-mail, cell phones, portable media players, camcorders, PDAs, and laptops to sync to your local computer folders. It is a highly customizable program that helps users to do the heavy lifting involved with the copying, moving, and synchronization of different directories. Most common operations can be performed with just a few clicks of the mouse, and additional customization is available without additional complexity

Option you can choose:

1. Synchronize – New and updated files are copied both ways. Renames and deletes on either sides are repeated on the other. This is a two ways sync.
2. Echo – New and updated files  are copied left to right. Renames and deletes on the left are repeated on the right.
3. Contribute – New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames on the left are repeated on the right. No deletions.

You can do a lot of other features such as preview before continue sync, change option, filter certain file extension, save overwritten files in the Recycle Bin, check file contents and much more.

SyncToy2.1 is powered by the latest synchronization engine from Microsoft Sync Framework 2.0 and provides better performance and robustness. The new features and improvements included in SyncToy 2.1 release are:

• Better Performance: The speed of file copy operations is significantly increased across the board.
• Improved Robustness: Much more resilient to transient network and file system errors and better error reporting which pin-points which file the sync failed on in case there’s a fatal error that stops the sync.
• Folder pair configuration backup: Folder pair configuration is automatically backed up under %localappdata%\microsoft\synctoy\2.0. User can replace SyncToyDirPairs.bin with the backup copy to resolve last saved configuration.
• Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed the data corruption issue when using SyncToy with NAS drives.
  • Fixed the issue that prevented uploading files to SharePoint when using SyncToy 2.0.
  • Fixed the issue that prevented delete changes from being synchronized when the sync option is set to “Echo”.
  • Fixed the UI issue where reported file time were off by the difference between local time and UTC when destination is a FAT volume.

System Requirements

This tool is simple yet powerful enough although it lacks the feature of automatic sync between folders. You still can make it automatic sync by adding a task scheduler and run it as command line. For more information on how to configure automatic scheduler for SyncToy 2.1, download it from microsoft download website and open the help file. It is under “Learn how to Schedule SyncToy”.