Does anybody know of or use a decent file/folder synchronising software, preferably free

What I need it for is to ensure that some very large folders on my desktop, laptop, backup drive (attached to either of the above or even the semi finished file server machine) and eventually (probably) the aforementioned SFFSM can be synchronised.

There are two large folders, one containing my music files of approx 30000 files/160GB, one my Photos of approx 10000 files/40GB and a smaller folder of around 4gigglybytes which has my personal/financial/generally lost without files in it.

All I need the software (All! Haha!) is ensure that when I add files to one machine they are adde to the like folders on the other drives, ditto for deleting (I think) and the same for altering files so that the most up to date Lotus/Excel/Word etc. file is saved.

For the small folder I can use Briefcase as I do at the moment, this is pretty quick and only updates changed files, what I need is something as simple and quick but for a much larger folder as I don't fancy waiting a couple of hours whilst my music folders are rewritten.

Has anybody got any helpful suggestions?

Thanks.

Two thoughts one is an ftp connection using software that will do a compare. or This MS link

Cheers Alun

Don't really want to go down the FTP route because it still needs comparison software.

However I have just downloaded the MS Synctoy and will try it with the laptop/desktop first, they even do a 64bit version which is handy!

I did like this bit :-
Upgrade:
- If upgrading from an earlier version of SyncToy (e.g. SyncToy 1.4 or SyncToy 2.0 Beta), it is **CRITICAL** to ensure that all folder pairs are fully synchronized using the previous version before running SyncToy 2.0 setup. Not following this guideline can lead to unintended behavior and partial data loss when running SyncToy 2.0 for the first time after upgrade. All folder pairs must also be fully synchronized at least once right after the upgrade is done.

in the notes, does this mean that MS are working on a rival for Snow Leopard?

I'll let you know how it goes after I've had a play.

Edit:-

I've tried it on a fairly large folder (100GB) with about 25000 files each, one on laptop same folder on desktop both on gigglybyte network.
First impressions are favourable,
Pros.
Simple to use
Can do a "Preview" run so you can check it dooesn't go silly
Took less than five minutes on first run
Down to a couple of minutes or less with some test changes done on both folders
Free
Cons
Only real con is that it only syncs two folders at a time, so I'll use one as "Master" that gets the most changes and sync it to the other 3 or 4 versions, If it runs as quickly and as well as this then I should be able to update and sync all my "Shared" folders in less than 20 minutes once a week.

Thanks Alun

I use SyncToy both at home and on some works PC's that get backed-up to external HDD's.

Easy to use and almost idiot proof.

Best of all its free

In my case its the other way round