One of the things I've always liked about Windows 2000 and later is the ability to auto-sync files between a server or other volume. Unfortunately, to date there's no feature-rich built-in solution for the Mac OS unless you script it yourself.

I have been in need to keep over a thousand documents and projects synchronized on my PowerBook across multilpe Windows 2000 servers, a home firewire drive, and a Mac OS X server at home. For years, I've been looking for solutions and purchased You Synchronize from You Software. It had gotten very good reviews and, for the most part, I had been happy with it. However, with the volume and complexity of synchronization as well as the need to instantly automout and dismount shares it was not only becoming a pain to work with, but was incredibly slow and crashed often.

So, a few months ago, I re-hit the net and came across ChronoSync and it's great reviews from MacWorld. Since the demo version was limited to only about 500 files, I emailed the developer and they gave me a full-featured unlock key for 30 days. WOW. Fast, stable, auto-mounted and (optionally) dismounted network shares and I could schedule each folder or location to synchronize at specific intervals or build a master scheduled that I could then pick and choose what to synchronize and when.

Synchronizing and having up-to-date copies of files is key to what I need to do. Chronosync has been for me the missing utility and it's been the utility that I've been waiting for. I'm looking forward to using 3.1 (which is what brought me here) and the new features.

The ONLY drawback with the application that I've been able to find is that it will not synchronize files who have names in Unicode (multi-lingual) characters. It will error out on those files. So, if you need to synchronize files whose file names are in not in English but in Unicode, you will have problems. I have not emailed the developer of this problem, but if that issue get's fixed then in my opinion this application really is the perfect sync solution on any platform. Kudos and in case you can't tell, highly recommended :-)