Application Review: Create Syncronicity

In my last post I had a brief review of Lucky Backup for Linux. It is a great program that I highly recommend for Linux users as a very robust back up situation. Unfortunately for Windows users Lucky Backup is not available. It took me a little bit of searching, but I have found a program available for Windows that works wonderful and is open source as well. The program is called Create Synchronicity and I would highly recommend any Windows users to download a copy and start putting it to use.

Much like Lucky Backup, when I have set this up on Windows systems at work (and for my dad's business) it is set for incremental backup where only new and modified files on the source side are copied over to the destination. Nothing is deleted on the backup destination and this program works flawlessly from my experience so far. It can also be scheduled to automatically run the backup at a set time, which I know also works well.

For my dad's business I have set up two Windows XP machines and one Windows 7 machine to automatically sync files to a mapped network drive (which is a share residing on a Linux server) after business hours. The first backup on the Windows 7 system took overnight and then some (two hard drives worth of data as the files from the previous workstation it replaced were copied to its hard drive) but since then the backups take significantly less time and are finished well before the start of business the next day. The Linux server then uses Lucky Backup to sync all the files now residing on it to an external hard drive.

I will definitely be installing this on my parent's new computer they are getting at home, scheduling it nightly and then I will sleep well knowing they are automatically being backed up. Check it out and you will not be disappointed.

How Windows 7 Makes Tech Support Easier

I haven't had a lot of experience with Windows 7 until recently. I work at a local school district and we recently replaced a fairly large selection of computers, and at this point you can no longer purchase licenses for Windows XP - every new computer comes with Windows 7.

This forces the tech department's hand when it comes to upgrading, or in our case running in a mixed environment with the majority of systems running XP and all the new machines from here on out being Windows 7 (or newer).

Granted, Windows 7 does cause issues when it comes to group policy and other issues that arise on a large, domain network. We also find issues with older printers no longer being supported under Windows 7 by either Microsoft of the printer manufacturer. So Windows 7 is not all rosy and great, but there is one big advantage as a Technician that makes my job much easier.

On our network (like most large organizations) individual user accounts have restrictions when it comes to administrating a system and installing software. Under the Windows XP environment, updating or installing software would require logging off of the restricted user and me logging in with my account with administrative rights to perform the needed actions. With some of the older systems and local user policies, it could take quite a while to log in and finish the job. In theory, Windows XP would allow you to enter your credentials to install or run certain programs while logged in as a restricted user, but I never had any success trying to change anything this way.

Now, with the Windows 7 systems I can perform administrative tasks by entering my credentials and being able to function with elevated rights. This is a big improvement, makes my job easier and produces less disruption for the computer user.  All in all I have been pretty impressed with Windows 7 during my exposure with the new systems at work - a definite and huge improvement over past Windows versions for sure.