Folder Sync 2 4+

Folder Sync 2 works GREAT! The UI, on the other hand, is not great. The renamed options in v2 (copy/update/mirror) are confusing. There also needs to be far better visual feedback as to progress. You have no confirmation that a compare is done other than that the counts stop going up. On a long compare that can be a real pain. Version one was much clearer on all these issues.

Want another star? Give me a compare progress indicator (NOT a skinny blue bar, either) and a dialog that pops and says "Compare Complete: Folders Match" or "Compare Complete: Folders do not match". That might make me go five stars, even.

Good feedback. Thanks.

Destek has written a superior product in Folder Sync 2.

Specifically, Folder Sync 2 doesn’t fail when things aren’t perfect. I had a client’s old WD hard drive (one of many), and it kept unmounting by itself, but then the Mac mounts it again a few seconds later. Folder Sync 2 doesn’t give up like others do. It just picks up where it left off. This was in the process of aggregating 10TB of data files spanning 10 years of archives. It also has significant depth and detail I haven’t found in other apps that try to achieve the same function.

Thank you for taking time to review.

I'll keep it short. Suppose what I want to do is copy any files on the left to the right that don't exist on the right.

I clicked on the menu and I can "mirror left to right". OK, what does "mirroring" mean? Mirrors make things opposite.

I clicked on "synch" and it says "update right to left" Huh? Does this update the right to be identical to the left, or does it update the what is on the right to the left, total opposites.

Fortunately, I found the arrows pointing right and left, and clicked them. If you want to update the software, by all means do so, but make sure your menu items are clear. I don't care if I have to "grabonkoqitz" my files as long as the me menu tells me this will copy anything different on the left over to the right.

Thanks for your feedback, I am sorry that you found the menu confusing, I will look into improving that.

Copy behaves as it would in any other file management app, select items and copy them to the other side. No intelligence is applied to a copy operation, if you’ve selected something and ask it to be copied, it will always be copied.

Update and Mirror are “Sync Types” that you can configure however you want them in the App Preferences. Sync Types use the rules you define to work out what should be copied, deleted or ignored.

The thinking behind Mirror and Update is to handle the following two main work flows.
1. Many people use Folder Sync to keep a backup of a folder from a Mac onto a NAS box, server or external hard drive. Mirror is great for this as you can use it to keep them both exactly the same.

2. Many people also use Folder Sync to push files from multiple Macs to a single folder on a NAS box, server or external hard drive. One example is that you own several Macs and they have small SSDs so occasionally you want to clean up the downloads folder and move that data off the SSD. In this scenario, you don’t want the source and target to be mirrored, you just want to push updated files from the SSD to the target drive.

In a compare tab, Folder Sync never commits any changes to disk without first showing you the Sync Preview and that provides a good safe way to experiment with some test data, to let you see how each of the various options are working.