15-Minute Reviews :: SyncCopy v1.1.0

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s title is SyncCopy version 1.1.0 by Flysoft – A folder-syncing tool with a built-in scheduler.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“SyncCopy is the powerful sync tool designed for Windows 9x/Me/NT4/2000/XP/2003 you have been looking for. It makes a same copy of your data files to another directory, disk or computer across the network.

Perhaps you’d like to continue your work in office and home or coffee bar, you’ve deleted some file or create some new file, you need all file keep same exactly. SyncCopy can help you with all these tasks and more.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is functional
• Both uni-directional and bi-directional support
• Include and exclude functionality
• Option of using Windows scheduler or built-in scheduler handy

Quick Cons

• Describing the two sync locations as ‘left side’ and ‘right side’ odd
• Did not want to browse into Entire Network->Microsoft Windows Network
• Crashed first time I attempted to sync and will not launch now

Expansion

Launching the application for the first time, I was greeted by a simple interface; No bells or whistles. However, the interface was functional and got you to where you needed to be quickly. I found myself diving into make a new sync task very quickly.

While the setup is quite common for a sync package, there is a few parts I should probably mention here. This application does offer both bi-directional and uni-directional syncing. Uni-directional offers two options for this one; copy files, or exact copy which removes any extra files or folders in the destination. This is handy if you change the folder quite drastically often and you don’t want to keep the ‘left-overs’ in the sync location.

There is also the exclude and include functionality here. Handy for developers or otherwise who don’t want to sync the compiled files and only the source files, or other similar situations where certain files will or will not be included. There is another exclude function here called Special Exclude. It allows you to exclude based on file flags as well, such as read-only, archive and compressed.

Another interesting aspect to this application is that you get an option of either using the Windows scheduler or the built-in scheduler. The built-in scheduler is a bit weak in my opinion, and the developer does seem to agree in his own words here, so offers a way to sync using Windows scheduler. This would be handy to keep resources and System Tray usage down, especially if you are already using Windows scheduler for something else.

When I did attempt to add a network location, I attempted to browse for the location via Entire Network->Microsoft Windows Network-> – For some reason, even though I could, outside this application, descend into this location and brose through the computers, this application would not pull up the list of computers; I had to resort to using a mapped drive or accessing it through Network Neighbourhood after I browsed to the shared folder I wanted to enter.

The usability stopped however upon completion of my first sync group. I attempted to sync when I finished setting up my first task, but after a few seconds of the new window coming up, I promptly got the ‘Application has unexpectedly quit’ window, forcing the application to exit. I attempted to relaunch the application, but it would not, giving me the Windows error again before the application would even show its main window. I tried finding the config file and thought I deleted it, but seemingly to no avail. Even after uninstalling, ensuring the entire application folder was gome and reinstalling, it still would mot launch. I took to another computer and tried the process again, hoping it was an isolated incident. This time, instead of doing bidirectional from local to network, I chose bidirectional from local to local (Ensuring they either directory were not inside each other of some form) and same thing happened with no apparent way to fix it. I’ve ran out of ways to continue testing the functionality of this application unfortunately.

Final Verdict

While this application is supposed to do basic (and some slightly more advanced functionality), the show-stopping crashbug on two different systems essentially put the end to my testing. While you may want to brave testing yourself while the application is free, I can’t recommend paying $19.95 for this title unfortunately.

As for alternatives, I headed over to SnapFiles and quickly found quite a few freeware alternatives (I’m just going to link to SnapFiles); CarbonFolder – Easy2Sync – Freeware Edition and ViceVersa Free are just a few I found quickly thumbing through the listing at SnapFiles but there are more, and someone in the comments at Giveaway may have some other suggestions as well.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, August 10, 2007