With virtually unlimited space and bandwidth…  and the ability to lock down portions of that space, I’m finally able to move to a cloud-based world for file-storage.    Which in my case means just synchronizing files between my computer and said cloud.  

I accomplish this primarily via FTP.   Now a generic FTP program isn’t going to do me much good, because it just uploads and downloads, but doesn’t really compare files.   If I were ever in a situation where I had some files newer in one place and other files newer in the other place… well I’d be forced to manually synch each and every file to ensure the most recent copy got to both.

Except that there is a nifty utility called SyncBack that actually works with FTP locations.   So it scans my machine, scans my cloud, and determines what has actually changed, putting the most recent copy where its missing.     Aside from just looking at whether or not the file in question exists in both places, there are two basic methodologies that a sync program uses to determine what’s changed.  File size and last-modified date.    The latter can be tricky to work with via FTP.    Web servers aren’t always sharing the same time zone as you are.  If its ahead of you, and you don’t time your syncing right, you could end up with an older copy showing a later date than the newer copy and your sync replacing the new copy with the old one.    SyncBack gets around this by first detecting whether or not the FTP server you’re uploading too supports forcing a specific date (the date the file was last modified according to your computer… which in the first sync is always in the past).    If it can support it, it’ll set the date on the FTP side and you’re set.    If it can’t, it’ll set the date on your local copy to match what’s on the FTP side… again you’re set.

SyncBack isn’t just for synching either.  It also supports backups, which just looks at what’s changed since the last back up allowing you to do more incremental things as opposed to a full and complete backup every single time. 

Unfortunately I have a massive amount of data to push out to the cloud.   I’ve had it running over a week and its only to the E’s in my music library.    I’m wondering how many years of non-stop uploading it will take to sync the video library to the cloud…