Windows XP: I would like to auto synchronize files between a a local drive and a network drive.

I am aware of Windows Briefcase but it is very slow and I have to tell it to synchronize. I really like the way Dropbox does there synchronization as it is almost instantaneous. It is very impressive. I would just use Dropbox but I cannot install it on the remote machine. Is there some tool or script I can create that will watch a particular folder for any changes and then sync those changes to the networked drive automatically and nearly instantaneously?

CLARIFICATION:

I would like this tool/script to to be a daemon that starts when windows starts and continually monitors a folder for any changes to its contents. Once it observes changes in the source or the destination it synchronizes the files that changed (Very similar to the way Dropbox works). I have a good idea about how I would do this in a Perl script and if a tool does not exist that does this I will write it myself in Perl. If someone has already done this can they share the script?

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5 Answers

Robocopy will do the job.

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It seems Dsynchronize does real-time backup to FTP, but I haven't tried it myself. The download on its author's page seems to be down at the moment, but there are other sites that host the file.

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If both the client computer and the share are both separate computes, then you can install either AeroFS or BitTorrent-Sync on both computers and you will have unlimited file syncronization.

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SyncToy is better than Briefcase, but is not automatic...it is fairly fast and offers some nice syncing options, and works well on network drives...

Free, by Microsoft.

You should try the Offline Files feature.

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