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by NelsonMinar 1644 days ago
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 is great.

1 comments

> It's very fast too

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.

Robocopy is what we used for copying multi-terabyte genomic data files off sequencers. It _mostly_ worked...it was not very fault-tolerant.
Robocopy uses /mt 8 by default.
/MT defaults to 8 threads (can be between 2 and 128 threads) but /MT is not on by default.
That's, if /mt is specified without a thread count, the count will default to 8. Without the switch it will run single-threaded.