Synchronising Music with Windows Home Server
I’ve enabled media sharing on my Windows Home Server so that I can listen to music through my XBox 360 in the lounge room but I also want to be able to listen to music from my laptop when I’m at work.
Although my laptop is backed up to my Windows Home Server nightly music needs to be stored in the Music share on the Windows Home Server for it to be shared.
So what I did was set up a scheduled task that synchronises the contents of my Music directory to the Windows Home Server Music share. I used trusty old robocopy to do this:
robocopy C:\Users\<username>\Music \\<homeserver>\Music /MIR /XF Thumbs.db desktop.ini /R:3
The /MIR switch tells robocopy to do a bi-directional synchronisation.
The /XF Thumbs.db desktop.ini switch tells robocopy not to synchronise the Thumbs.db or desktop.ini files.
The /R:3 switch tells robocopy to only retry copies 3 times instead of the default 1 million times.
Uhh… re-read the robocopy /? regarding the /MIR param. It’s not bi-directional… it just replicates any deletes you have done.
Try removing several files from your laptop’s Music folder, and run your robocopy command… poof… those same ‘several files’ vaporize from your home server.
I’m trying to fix this problem as well. MirrorFolder does bi-directional well… but won’t work on file server clusters.
Best of luck
Matt
April 2, 2009 at 3:04 am
That’s actually by design… I’m using this for synchronisation not backup.
William Bartholomew
April 10, 2009 at 3:38 pm