Real time sync flash drive to folder?

[cleverhandle]

I've Googled up quite a number of synchronization tools for Windows 7, but none that quite fit what I want. Hoping somebody here knows the right tool for the job...

I have a flash drive full of Very Important Documents that's used on several different computers. I'd like to find the most efficient possible way to keep it backed up. Ideally, when I plug it into my main workstation (where it's used almost daily), it would automatically push any existing changes on the flash drive into a backup folder and would then automatically sync any further work I do on those documents before ejecting it, without needing me to click anything. If that backup folder could live on my file server so much the better, but I can live with a local copy. The important thing is that if the flash drive dies or gets lost, I lose as little work as possible.

Before anyone suggests it, cloud solutions are not a good solution for me. It's frequently necessary that I be able to hand someone (possibly someone with minimal tech skills) the flash drive to pull files off of it, and logging into a cloud service doesn't work for that. I can elaborate if necessary and I'm open to suggestions, but I'm pretty sure the best bet is simply backing up the flash drive as efficiently as possible.

I've tried Win7's Sync Center, but as far as I can it's hardwired to "pull down" from a network share as a source, not to push up a local disk to a folder or share.

I'm playing around with Microsoft's SyncToy right now, and it will mostly do what I want (after assigning a permanent mount point for the flash drive to avoid drive letter confusion). But it's not real-time. I can write a batch file for it and make it a desktop shortcut, and that's pretty decent. But I'm hoping there's something even better out there that would work in real time and let me be even lazier about backups.

I would be willing to pay $20-$30 for the right tool here if necessary. Any suggestions?

 

[Binky]

Puresync or a batchfile.

 

[cleverhandle]

Puresync

It's late and I'll need to test this more thoroughly tomorrow, but this looks awesome. After modifying a file on the drive on a different machine, it autodetects the change upon connection and immediately syncs it (provided I have the systray program running). Thank you! It seems that the free version will only sync on connect and not automatically sync files I modify later - I'll need the paid version for that. But that's worth the ~$25 to me. This looks really good.

...or a batchfile.

Can you elaborate on that? How would a batchfile sync in something like real time? It seems like this would be equivalent to SyncToy where I'd have to manually run the batch file when I want to sync. Not terrible, but not the perfect solution either.

 

[cleverhandle]

Close, but not perfect. Even with the paid version, triggering an autosync by file modification requires an NTFS file system. I'd prefer to keep the flash drive FAT32 so that Mac people can write to it if necessary. Still, the sync-on-connect feature works very nicely and even tracks a volume identifier so that you don't have to worry about drive letters changing. This is better than what I had been doing (manually clicking an icon every time) and you can't beat the price.

Thanks again for the suggestion - I think I'll be fine with this. But if there are other alternatives out there, I'm happy to hear them.

 

[$panky]

Try freefilesync. Its an excellant free and portable program. I never thought about it, but perhaps you could even put it on the flash drive itself and set it up to run automatically when inserted?

It actually has two parts, freefilesync, which is the gui to setup the sync, and realtimesync which will monitor a folder and run a batch file created by freefilesync when something changes.

If you decide to try it be sure to read the documentation for realtimesync. I seem to remember there were certain conditions where a change could not be synced immediately, although it would be the next time the sync is activated. As far as I know it will work on fat32. It does work with network locations.