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I finally quit using it because I got Starlink at my house and now have enough bandwidth to just let Syncthing keep the machines in sync. But if you need to sync through a hard drive you carry around FreeFileSync is great.
This used to be my go-to sync software. I used it via portableapps on Windows. I stopped using it in favor of free portable syncing software when they started charging for the portable version and not allowing it to run from the PA launcher.
In my experience, the older PortableApp versions of FreeFileSync continue to work just fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can also recommend Cygwin, and I really don’t understand why so many people seem to have either completely overlooked it, or outright dislike it. It’s so much better than having to keep a full blown WSL “VM”/container just to get access to basic tools.
It's been a long time since I've used it, but I seem to recall Cygwin having a lot of minor but annoying "gotchas" with things like package management, file paths, etc. that you don't have to deal with in a more complete environment like WSL. The fact that software needs to be specifically compiled for Cygwin is a big enough hassle on its own that I'd rather just use a "real" Linux environment and not have to deal wi…
The killer feature of this over rsync or rclone (which I love and use almost daily) is pre-run inspection and conflict resolution for each individual file. You know when you need it, and when you do, FreeFileSync shines. For those mentioning WSL enabling using rsync on Windows: have been using it with Cygwin for years, zero issues. So, WSL wasn't a hard requirement.
This used to be my go-to sync software. I used it via portableapps on Windows. I stopped using it in favor of free portable syncing software when they started charging for the portable version and not allowing it to run from the PA launcher.
What did you switch to? In my experience, the older PortableApp versions of FreeFileSync continue to work just fine.
For Linux I bit the bullet and learned rsync and a little bash programming. I was putting this off for a while but happy with my really simple script.
I've used FreeFileSync to keep two Windows machines in sync for years. It works incredibly well. It's very fast too; copying lots of files in Windows is often bafflingly slow. Whatever this tool does is not. I finally quit using it because I got Starlink at my house and now have enough bandwidth to just let Syncthing keep the machines in sync. But if you need to sync through a hard drive you carry around FreeFileSync…
This is due to parallel (threaded) copying, which is a paid-for feature in recent versions.
If you need fast copying, "robocopy" comes bundled with Windows and it has /mt option that allows spawning multiple copying threads. This is as fast as gets, beating even this tool with ease.