I have 5 win2003 file servers (soon to be 10) in various parts of the US and India. I cannot run DFS on them due to ownership issues - Politics. Anyway, I have a shared folder on each server that I would like to synchronize across the board. There is NOT a central server that pushes out to the rest. Each server could receive new files to push out to the rest. There will be adding and deleting, but NOT modifying. So multi-point file editing is not an issue, but multi-point file creation is. Deletion I can do manually if need be. Scheduled syncs would be awesome...but not necessary. The app can be run on the servers.
The file comparison idealy only needs to go like 3 folders deep - I am yet to see an app that offers this though. The shared folders contain installation files for various applications. For example, we have a folder called "ms_office_pro_2003". In that folder is the installation files for Office 2003. All of those files dont need to be compared for new updates - I would just push out a new folder name with the updated files and then delete the old version. However, I do have folders like "java2re" which contains various install .exe's for the different versions of java. Somethign with an extension filter would probably help this issue, but some of these intallation folders go 24+ deep. Well that takes a LONG time to search across the US and India. Most of the filters that I have found filter out what is compared AND what is copied. So if I tell it to just compare .exe's - it wont push out the non-.exe's even if they dont exist.
Right now Im trying out SMARTSYNC: http://www.smsync.com/ . It does an okay job, but it takes a LONG time to scan through and do the comparisons due to the fact that it goes though EVERY folder. I also have to run it twice in order to get all the files at one server location (first run) and then send them out to everyone else (2nd run). It also loses it's connection to the servers if it's a large amount of files to push out (we push around 11 gigs a week).
I'm not looking for a $1500 solution either. I can deal with some of these freeware and $100 apps. They get the job done...just not very efficiently. Nevertheless, I figure there has to be something out there that will do this job better than what I have found.
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