A poor man's Windows rsync
When I’m on a Windows box and I want to sync two directories (remote or local), I use this little one-liner:
@echo off xcopy %1 %2 /M /E /Y /Z
The switches are:
- M: Copy only files with the archive bit set
- E: Copy directories and subdirectories, even empty ones
- Y: Supress prompting for overwrites
- Z: Copy in network restartable mode
The %1 and %2 obviously denote parameter arguments when called from a batch file, so when saved as ‘file_sync.bat’:
C:\>file_sync.bat c:\somedirectory \\someserver\sometargetdir
Will sync the local directory with the remote share. When files are modified or added, Windows sets the NTFS archive bit. When run again the script will only copy the new or amended files.
