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New to Toucan, am I doing something wrong??

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survivorman
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New to Toucan, am I doing something wrong??

Hello all, great site and software.

I tried out Toucan recently, and it doesn't appear to work for me.

I used the "copy" mode, to copy files from the source folder to the target folder.

The preview shows the existing files in the target folder as red, and the new files in the target folder as blue. I expect that when I copy, it would only copy the blue files over.

However, when I run the copy process, it appears to indiscriminently copy all files over, whether they already exist in the target folder or not. This would seem to be not what the copy function is supposed to do.

I am using the 2.0.4 version.

Am I doing something wrong, or does Toucan just do a blind copy? If it does a blind copy, then it would be no better than just using Windows Explorer to copy files over...

Thanks for your help.

bmguida
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Try using Update

The copy function will in fact copy all files from the source directory into destination directory regardless if they are already present in the destination.

If you are trying to move only the new files to the destination directory you need to use either the mirror (update) function or the Update. You may want to try just an update first. I believe if you mirror update this will also remove files from you destination directory that do not exist on the source directory.

survivorman
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Thanks for the quick

Thanks for the quick reply.

When I had read the help earlier, it said this about "update"

Update - This is similar to copy, except it only overwrites older files

So I tried it out, in preview mode, and it seemed to highlight and create not only files that do not exist in the target folder, but it would also copy newer versions of files from the source folder to the target folder.

However there are a couple of problems with that:
1. It's not a hard rule that I want to update the older files with a newer version. The timestamp of the newer file may seem to indicate it's a new file, but it may not be, depending on when my newer folder was created and copied from elsewhere or downloaded online.

An example of this is: I download files from iTunes, it's in a back up drive / folder. While on the road away from home, I realize I don't have some of my iTunes music, and re-download the music, which will have a newer timestamp. Back at home, I don't want to copy the newer files over to the back up folder, and spend the time waiting for the back up to complete. In this case if the file exists in the target folder, I want Toucan to ignore it and only copy files that don't exist in the target folder

2. Update mode seem to mark certain files that are virtually identical in time as older in the target folder, and want to overwrite them with files from the source folder.

An example of is - I have an extract of Office 2003 on my back up folder, with the exact same time stamp as the Office 2003 source folder. Yet Update mode marks the back up as if it's an older version and will copy it / overwrite again.

I don't know if there can be a tolerance set to not copy files within "2 minutes" of each other. I theorize that occassionally Windows copies files with a slightly different timestamp. For example, source file may have "2/20/09, 9:55:50am" (50 seconds) , while target file may have time stamp "2/20/09, 9:55:55am" (55 seconds). I don't why Windows does this but I have seen it time and again. In this case I want Toucan to ignore files that are identical except for a time difference within a few seconds / minutes.

Again I hope I have misunderstood the software, otherwise the application is not very useful to me.

In the interim, I am using PathSync, which is portable and free, allows for more manual control, to do my back up / syncs. But I like Toucan's interface better, so I hope I can get this application to work in the way I think it should work.

Thanks again.

PS - I also would like to have an option under copy to "ignore files that already exist in the target folder, so as to avoid system resources when copying from source folder". A blind copy of all files really is no better than just using Windows Explorer copy command to copy files over, and would seem to defeat the point of using Toucan.

Steve Lamerton
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Hopefully

the preview will be a bit better in 2.0.5 which should be out any day now. As to your questions:

1. Update also does an md5 check after doing a timestamp check, if the md5 of the two files are the same then it doesnt bother to copy them. This should solve this problem.

2. See above

EDIT: Having just taken a look in the source the md5 check isnt used when previewing, originally this was done for performance reasions but I think I shall change this in the release after 2.0.5 so it is more realistic.

EDIT 2: 2.0.5 was released whilst I was typing this post.

survivorman
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Hi Steve, that is fantastic!

Hi Steve, that is fantastic! So just to confirm, the copy function in 2.0.4 does just a brute copy of all files regardless if they exist already in the target folder, right?

If so, I will very much look forward to 2.0.5.

Thanks again!!

EDIT: can't wait to try out 2.0.5. But yes, if you could change the preview so it is realistic that would be awesome. If there is a disconnect between preview and the actual execution, it would make the preview much less useful.

Steve Lamerton
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Yes,

copy just brute copies, the advantage of doing it in Toucan over Windows is that if it can't copy a file (for example) Windows will give up and not copy anything, Toucan will try each file.

And yes, I just tried changing the preview and it seems pretty snappy, the next release will be 2.1 (hopefully) and I shall change it for then

survivorman
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Thank you Steve!! This is

Thank you Steve!! This is great work!!!

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