For years I have been writing xcopy and robocopy scripts to do things like copy data between two directories or machines. Some of you may know about this one, but I just learned about it this week and it is great for all kinds of similar tasks. It’s called SyncToy and it’s a free app put out by Microsoft. You can set a source and destination folder and select many options via a gui and run it. You can also configure it to run via the command line and add it to the task scheduler. An example of just one thing it can do is what I’m using it for right now. I have 175gb of data to migrate from ok-ts-01 to ok-ts-03, but don’t want to bog down the server and people are constantly working with the data during the day. I set SyncToy to run in the task scheduler from 9pm to 7am and it does whats called an ECHO from ok-ts-01 to ok-ts-03. This means it will pick up where it left off the night before and only copy data that has changed or is new. It will also sync items that were deleted. If it was removed from ok-ts-01, it will remove it from ok-ts-03. This is a very handy tool that I have already found many uses for this week and will be implementing it in many future areas as well. Backups, DR preparation, migrating from one machine to another, etc.
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