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How to mirror non-contiguous folders

SyncBackFree is the freeware version of SyncBack. It is *not* an evaluation version of SyncBackPro/SE.
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Bilateral
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How to mirror non-contiguous folders

Post by Bilateral »

Is there a way to set up a profile to mirror a selection of folders from one drive to another? For example, what if I want to copy and set up a mirror of the Documents, Downloads and Desktop folders from one drive to another? I can only see a way to mirror each folder separately as a separate profile. I want to know, can I create this as part of the same profile?

Also, if I want to mirror an entire drive to another drive, and keep this mirrored over time, is SyncBackFree capable of handling that reliably? The drive might have 40,000 to 50,000 files on it.
Bilateral
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Re: How to mirror non-contiguous folders

Post by Bilateral »

It looks to me like the answer is that you cannot make one job all at once, but you can make separate jobs (a lot more work) and somehow link them to be run together; although how to do that is not at all clear to me.
cliffhanger
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Re: How to mirror non-contiguous folders

Post by cliffhanger »

This KB article may give you food for thought.

If you want to go the 'separate profiles' route, you can speed this up by right-clicking profile #1in main GUI > Copy (on context menu) > give new name > Modify resulting new profile > edit the Source and Destination paths to suit the new job. Repeat by copying #1 again or #2 to create #3

Multiple profiles can be grouped together to that you can run 'three in a row' (for example) with one trigger event. Click Help > Search > "group" > top hit for more background

There should be no problems handling 40-50,000 files providing you are not abnormally short of free memory at the time. I would not expect you would start running into any issues unless processing 10x as many files or more (it depends a lot on the combined lengths of all the paths\filenames SB is comparing / holding in RAM, so no exact limit exists)
Bilateral
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Re: How to mirror non-contiguous folders

Post by Bilateral »

Thanks very much for your reply. The copying and then amending the first profile does help a bit, but it sounds like it gets pretty complex to create a selection of files and folders, rather than copying a single folder in a job. The programs that have a series of check boxes to select the folders and files you want to copy/mirror have an advantage here. I don't see that capability in SyncBack.
cliffhanger
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Re: How to mirror non-contiguous folders

Post by cliffhanger »

The dialog under the 'Choose subdirectories & files' is a tree control which can in theory expand to show every file and folder in the appropriate location (that part of the path which is/will be common to both Source and Destination). Every visible node (folder or file) will have its own checkbox (defaulting to 'selected' unless you change this) governing whether a folder or file is selected as part of the profile's scope. De-selecting a folder will naturally de-select all nodes 'below' that point also. Files can also be de/selected individually, should you wish to do so, Note: it is often the case that de-selecting everything in a node then re-selecting the wanted objects is a more efficient way of configuring the selections (rather than starting with 'all selected' and de-selecting the unwanted objects). This obviously depends on the ratio of wanted : unwanted objects.
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