Over the last Christmas season The Weekly Geek formatted and reinstalled several of his home systems. Of course backing up is a large part of that, unfortunately this meant that many files were duplicated onto the main system used for backing up.

I have been using Microsoft’s SyncToy to sync my data from the laptop to my “main” PC and to another backup computer. This handy little program has kept many old files under control and allowed actions on one computer to be duplicated on another system painlessly.

Here is a link to the program. SyncToy

You might have to cut and paste the link together since it is so long or simply go to Microsoft’s web site then to their “Downloads” link and search for it.

So far I have liked what this program can do however, if you have just too many duplicates on one system this is not a good method to use. It also is not the best at backing up since it merely copies the files to a different location, no compression is available, but then again, I guess that is what “Sync” means.

I updated to the latest version last week in an effort to sync my Vista PC with my XP ones, no luck, Windows Vista uses a different folder format, oh well, that was not a big surprise.

Stay tuned for my reviews of duplicate removing programs that have been using.