synctoy

The harddisk saga was finally concluded when I took the external casing back to the shop and got the defective unit replaced. Triumphantly, I plugged the new unit into my computer and watched gleefully as it was auto-detected and finally showed up in the system. I pulled up the disk management tools ... and discovered that the software RAID option is only available in the server edition, not my Windows XP Professional. Oops.


I also realised that the Backup tools built into Windows are designed more for tape backup, not for mirroring to drives. Double oops.


So instead, I found Microsoft Synctoy to do the job. It's a very simple software that allows you to synchronise files or folders (or even whole disks), on anything from handphones and PDAs to external hdds. It comes with most of the synchronisation options mobile computing users would be familiar with, allowing a few options to customise the sync relationship. In my case, I just chose to echo one drive onto another and scheduled a weekly synchronisation, to ensure I never have to worry about losing precious data.

Microsoft SyncToy v1.4 is a free download for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Users of XP systems may also need to install the .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package which is also available for download.