Running profiles with the scheduler running one job at a time

One way to run jobs one after another is to use the Scheduler. Give them a scheduled time and leave a minute between each profile. On the Scheduler tab sheet, click on the Tools and Settings button and uncheck “Start Profiles In Parallel”. Alternatively, go to the Program Settings dialog, tab sheet Advanced, and specify 1 for Max. simultaneous jobs.

Running profiles via manual invocation

For manual runs, select the profiles in the Overview, right-click the selection and choose “Run in Unattended Mode”. This will run them one after another, as opposed to “Run in Background”.

If you need Syncovery to do other things while the jobs are running, you can open Syncovery a second time.

Chaining profiles directly

Another way is to chain profiles. As an “after” command line in “Execute before/after” you can put:
RUN PROFILE Profile Name

This will start the next profile when the first one has finished, and so forth. The problem is that the chaining is always done, so it may be a problem if there is an occasion where you want to run only one of the chained jobs.

Using the command line

Yet another way is to use the Syncovery command line and invoke your jobs from a batch file or script:
Syncovery Command Line

Syncovery Update Required

For continued compatibility with recent Windows 10 updates, please make sure you update Syncovery to version 7.98d at least.

It is recommended to update Syncovery before installing any further Windows updates.

Syncovery 7.98d includes an updated Syncovery VSS Service to fix a potential compatibility issue that could cause the upgrade installation to fail and/or get stuck in a reboot loop. Or Windows might just boot up with a blank screen, or show a spinning mouse cursor instead of a login screen.

This happened only on some systems, but to be safe, please update Syncovery.

If you already updated Windows, that’s fine. In that case please update Syncovery too to avoid any potential problems in the future.

Questions? Please email support@syncovery.com.

Syncovery 8 can use Amazon S3 Inventories. On the second tab sheet of the Internet Protocol Settings dialog, please choose “Use S3 Inventories”.

To make Amazon generate these Inventories, go to the AWS S3 Management Console and refer to the screenshot below.

Inventory Name: your free choice
Filters: empty, or specify the folder you need
Destination Bucket: must be the same bucket that is listed
Destination Prefix: must be empty

Syncovery supports the Rsync protocol by using an rsync.exe command line utility. Here’s how to set it up:

On the Program Settings dialog, you need to specify which rsync.exe to use. There’s also a button to download an rsync for Windows installer.

In the profile, you click on the Internet button for one of the two sides of the sync. Choose Rsync as protocol. You can securely connect via SSH or use rsync directly (unsecured). The unsecured connection can be used within a LAN or VPN, for example.

When using it via SSH, you need to have a client certificate and configure it on the Certificates tab sheet, as well as choose it on the Security tab sheet.

Because of limitations of the rsync.exe command line, some features are not working. For example, Syncovery cannot delete any files via rsync.

Because of rsync limitations, it is often better to use SFTP/SSH. It can do block level copying, too, and also it can get a recursive listing similar to rsync (on Unix/Linux servers). The recursive listing checkmark is on the second tab sheet of the Internet/FTP dialog.

Please see the following page for details about block level copying with SFTP:
Block Level Copying

The limitation with block level copying and SFTP is currently that it does block level for uploads only.

When a job runs in unattended mode, there can be some conditions which have to be confirmed when the profile is configured. For example, file deletions have to be confirmed specially, in addition to configuring the sync operating mode to include deletions.

To give the confirmations, please edit your profile in Advanced Mode, go to the Safety section at the bottom and choose the tab sheet “Unattended Mode”.

For an Exact Mirror profile, you would usually make sure that the top four checkmarks are chosen and that the last one is not chosen (Special Safety Checks). The first four checkmarks allow things like replacing files and deleting files. The last checkmark would impose additional safety checks which can prevent file deletions, so you’ll want to remove that checkmark.

In addition, you should specify a percentage of files which may be deleted during a profile run. You should not set this to 100% unless you expect that nearly all files are regularly going to be deleted. This is a safety percentage. If more files than allowed need to be deleted, the program realizes that something is wrong and disables the deletions completely. This will protect you against rare error conditions like disk errors or network communication errors, which can sometimes cause empty folders to be reported on the source side. Due to the percentage limit, the program will not delete everything from the destination if suddenly the source seems to be empty, or nearly empty.

However, even if you do specify 100% for deletions, the program will never delete all files in order to protect your data. If the source side is empty, it will throw an error and refuse to delete everything from the destination. This should be a good safety measure for most use cases. Some customers, on the other hand, have use cases where deleting all files is a regular, normal requirement. These customers can disable the 100% deletion protection by adding the following line to the [Main] section of the INI file:

UnattendedDeleteAllIsOK_IfDelPercIs100=YES

(Add this only if you need to delete 100% of files in a destination folder in unattended mode!)

There are different ways to keep several versions of your files on your backup storage. Firstly, in the profile under Versioning, you can specify to keep a number of
older versions for each file. Each file will be versioned independently, and the Restore Wizard can restore your newest data, or restore according to a specified target date in the past.

However, some customers prefer to have 5 to 7 complete and independent copies of their data. To achieve this, you can use the variable $WEEKDAY in the destination path. In that case, you would not use anything from the Versioning tab sheet.

This will keep seven days of complete folder copies, if the profile runs on every day of the week. It will cause your backup folders to be named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. and the next week’s backup is simply going to re-use the same folder from the week before.

For example, your destination path could be like this:
D:\Daily Backups\$WEEKDAY

Use Exact Mirror Mode to make sure that the backup is always identical even though the folder is re-used. Under Safety->Unattended Mode, allow file deletions as well as overwriting newer files with older ones (which will hardly ever be necessary, but should be chosen).

See also: Variables to use in your sync paths

Syncovery runs on:

Windows
All versions of Windows since Windows XP and Server 2003 are fully supported, including Windows 10 and Server 2016 (with Desktop Experience) and all other versions and editions of Windows that have a graphical user interface. Syncovery is available in 32-bit and 64-bit editions. The 64-bit editions require at least Windows Vista. For older 64-bit Windows versions, please use the 32-bit edition of Syncovery.

For Windows 2000, please download Syncovery version 6 from our additional downloads page.

Macintosh
Syncovery runs on all Intel Macs, and on all Mac OS X versions since 10.4 “Tiger” up to including the latest version (currently 10.12 “Sierra”). An older version 5.73 is also available if you need to run it on older PowerPC Macs. This version also requires at least Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger”.

Linux
The command line Edition SyncoveryCL is available for Linux. It should run on any recent 32-bit or 64-bit Linux distribution for Intel processors. See the Linux download page for details.