SyncToy - Echo Feedback

[Guest]

Looks like it could be a great tool, but it just failed my first test.

I used two small test folders, each containing the same 16 files.

I want to keep them in sync - I want the RIGHT to be a replica of the LEFT.
Echo seems to be just the job for this.

In my test, I deleted a file from the RIGHT folder, so in my test folders I
had 16 files on the left and 15 files on the right.

I ran SyncToy Echo Preview.

It showed nothing to be sync'd. I hoped it would show that a file exists in
the LEFT folder but not in the RIGHT folder.

HOWEVER!!! For my second test….
I then added a new file to the LEFT folder, so now 17 on the left and 15 on
the right.

I ran SyncToy Echo Preview

It identified 2 files in the LEFT that are not in the RIGHT. One of them
(the new addition to the LEFT) was marked as necessary to be copied. The
other file (the one I previously deleted from the RIGHT) was identified, but
not marked to be copied.

I manually marked the two extra files on the LEFT, and ran Echo Run (ie
actually do the sync)

Both files were copied to the RIGHT and both folders then held 17 files each.

It seems to me that this is a bug - you need to add files to the LEFT in
order for SyncToy to recognise that a file had been deleted from the RIGHT.

 

[Guest]

Thanks Mark,

It turns out that SyncToy is properly executing an "Echo" action. It also
turns out that SyncToy doesn't have an action that perfectly suits your
needs.

The best way to think about Echo is: Anything that happens on the left gets
repeated on the right. Implicit in this is the idea that anything that
happened on the right is Ignored. That's why deleting a file on the right has
no effect on the sync.

Truthfully, coming up with a subset of actions that gave enough flexibility
to users without overwhelming users was far and away the hardest part of
building SyncToy. For example, one of the dozens of actions we eventually
decided not to implement was "make the right look like the left"

In this case basically, we decided that if you deleted a file on the right,
you did so on purpose, and you don't want that file continually reappearing
every time you do a sync. Just in case you did want that behavior, we put the
unchecked action in the preview list.

I hope this helps...
george

 

[Homer J. Simpson]

So, "echo" != "mirror".

This is all I'm asking of SyncToy.