Syncovery 7.01

Overview

Syncovery is a comprehensive synchronization tool. With it you can synchronize local and network hard drives, FTP servers, plus there is support for Amazon S3 and Google Drive. There are several different synchronization modes that you can select depending on your needs. You can also create backups which can be compressed to ZIP archives and encrypted, without any limitations (such as file size and name length).

Installation

Installation is as easy as any typical program’s installation. At some point you’ll have to choose the type of installation you want to make: Standard Installation, Full Installation with Remote Service, Only Remote Service for destination computer and Custom Installation. There are 4 available components (Syncovery with Background Scheduler and Service, Syncovery VSS Helper Service for Locked Files, Remote Service and Remote Service Control Panel) and depending on the mode that you choose, different combinations of them are included in the installation. Standard installation includes the first two components, Full installation includes all four, Only Remote Service includes the last two and in Custom mode you get to pick the ones you want installed.

Syncovery is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, but we'll focus on the Windows version in this review.

Interface

There are two modes in this program; the Wizard mode and Advanced mode. In Wizard mode you have 4 options: create a new profile and perform a synchronization or backup, edit/run of the saved profiles, run multiple profiles and start the scheduler. In Advanced mode there are two tabs, “Profile Overview” and “Scheduler” in both of which you can see the a list with all the available profiles/scheduled tasks and manage them using the buttons on the toolbar. It’s better for beginners to use Wizard mode first and once they get familiar with the program, switch to Advanced since it’s faster and much more convenient.

Pros

When creating a new profile you can choose the left and right hand side of the task and then choose which way you want the synchronization to happen (left to right, right to left or both ways). After doing so you must select between three sync types: Standard Copying, SmartTracking and Exact Mirror. Standard Copying will only copy new, missing or modified files, Exact Mirror will make an exact copy of the source side to the destination side and SmartTracking is the option which is mostly used for two-way synchronization, since it can detect moved, deleted or changed files. A few other options are offered to you when creating a profile, such as file masks and schedule options. You can have multiple profiles and manage them easily.

There is support for synchronizing with FTP, SSH, WebDAV, Amazon S3, HTTP, Google Docs, Azure and Rsync.

Zipping and encrypting your files with 256-bit AES encryption is also possible.

Cons

For more advanced settings of this program you need to search a bit before you can find what you want, since there are a lot of places to look into. Also, it would be nice if the program wasn’t translated to German only.

Alternatives

A lot of software with the same purpose and perhaps with an even more enhanced functionality exist. Some of them are Cobian Backup (free), Duplicati (free) and Synkron (free).

Conclusion

It’s a very lightweight program that could do a fine job even in a demanding situation, since it doesn’t lack features and doesn’t have any stability issues. Even though you could do some more research and find better ones for free, it’s not a bad idea to test this one first.