I'm a PC tech. I carry a flash drive created with the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool. After that process is finished, I copy a number of custom folders from a backup drive onto the flash drive. These folders contain software tools and documentation.
It's not uncommon to lose or misplace the flash drive so I try and keep a backup flash drive just in case. I thought to use the FFS program to simplify the process of keeping the "master" backup folder and the two separate flash drives as identical as possible.
I manually created the main flash drive and manually copied all my custom folders using Windows Explorer. Then I used FFS and created a "Sync Session" and tested it. It worked just as I expected and successfully copied just the few files I modified on purpose to test the program.
Then I removed the original first flash drive and plugged in the drive I intended to be the backup. It is identical hardware to the first drive, a 32GB SanDisk brand USB 3.0 (slow but steady) drive.
Once again, I manually copied the files that belonged on the flash drive. Then I ran the FFS program and did a compare using the exact same session as before, and I was surprised to note that the compare indicated that over 2k files were missing from my master backup drive (a standard 2TB Sata-3 HDD). I checked both the spinning drive and the backup flash drive using File Explorer and every file appears to be identical.
I rebooted the computer, then tried both flash drives and the FFS program again. The first flash drive shows correctly that it's completely sync'd to the spinning HDD. However when I plug in the flash drive intended to be the backup it still displays 2101 files which need to be copied back over the HDD.
At that point I searched for and deleted all the sync.ffs_gui files in all 3 drives and tried again but the 2nd flash drive still will not compare correctly.
I'm at a loss to figure this out. I don't want to just arbitrarily copy files over top of identical files. I'm attaching some screen snips in order to help document what I'm seeing.
I'll start with the good pics...
The good compare:
- Good compare
- filesync_good.PNG (53.87 KiB) Viewed 443 times
- Master HDD folder
- actual_e_drive.PNG (34.33 KiB) Viewed 443 times
- Original working flash drive
- working_f_drive.PNG (50.66 KiB) Viewed 443 times
- Bad compare
- filesync_bad.PNG (83.72 KiB) Viewed 443 times
- The 2nd flash drive contents
- backup_f_drive.PNG (51.86 KiB) Viewed 443 times
