Toucan

This may be answered elsewhere, but I tried searching both the help files and the forums, maybe I missed it.

Is there a way to Update, Copy Newer, or Copy Missing in a sync operation?

I have a situation where I have multiple source folders that will have files added to them regularly:

Folder A Folder B Folder C
File A1 File B1 File C1
File A2 File B2 File C2
File A3 File B3 File C3
... ... ...
File An File Bn File Cn

The subject line is self explanatory.

Try copying from a source that has a deeply nested set of folders -- Toucan fails to copy (and produces an error message for) files that have a total pathname of more than about 250 characters.

Try something like:

C:\Files\Fourscore\and\seven\years\ago\our\fourfathers\ [...] \not\perish\from\the\earth.txt

Maximum allowable pathname size on NTFS filesystems (the most common Windows filesystem) is 32767 unicode characters, with the max length of any single folder or filename of 255. I have some that are about 350-ish in length.

In the "Source" pane of the "Sync" tab, the user can right-click on a file or folder and get a context-menu prompt that offers to include or exclude the selected folder/file to the currently selected "Rules" set.

This would be very handy if it worked properly but unfortunately it's rather squirrelly.

I started out with three rules in my "Rules" set, and when I attempt to add more "Exclude" rules to it via the right-click menu, instead of adding the new rules onto the end of the ruleset, it just semi-randomly replaces one of the existing three rules.

When I invoke Toucan with the commandline and forget the possible options, I use "Toucan.exe -?" to ask what they are.

The good news is that Toucan helpfully lists the correct options for me.

The bad news is that it does this in a popup text window that lasts for about 50 milliseconds before it closes itself, making it impossible to read.

Could you please place a "press any key to continue" prompt at the end of that list? This would prevent the Toucan window from exiting until the user had a chance to read the "help text".

When Sync'ing, does Toucan get a list of all the files in a folder and then sort them to decide what order to copy them in? Or does it just do them in whatever order the operating system returns the names in a wildcard search?

The reason I'm asking is that when I'm Syncing folders that have large numbers of files, I note that they copy in kinda-sorta alphabetical order (A-Z), except for the fact that *uppercase* letters are all processed before (come in the sort order prior to) any *lowercase* letters.

For example, the following filenames will process in this order:

The Windows operating system creates a (usually hidden) folder on most disks which it names "System Volume Information".

This is the folder where Windows stores its "System Restore" checkpoint data.

It's a "super protected" folder -- no application, not even in Administrator mode, is allowed to view or modify this folder or its contents.

Nonetheless, Toucan (v3.0.4) attempts to treat it like any other folder, and generates multiple errors as a result.

I have been looking into back up programs as I have migrated from WinXP to Win7. I had EZbackitup previously and did not know if a program last updated in 2004 would be suited to back up a computer on a new OS. I noticed that this program had a nice interface, but like a number of back up programs, it implements a compression format. Aside from saving space, why do back up programs compress or bundle the back up files as a zip file (or other formats)? Can one mirror the files as if we were copying all the files directly to an external drive?

When one clicks on the + sign on the RULES page, "Toucan.exe has stopped working". Every time.

Anyone else seen this?

P.

Not supporting expressions like (mp3|wav|avi) ?
I have:
File to exclude *.*\.(mp3|wav|avi)

when reload toucan, i see that:

File to exclude *.*\.(mp3
File to exclude wav
File to exclude avi)

seems toucan use | character in the Rules.ini to merge equal rule sections, and regexp alternation operation conflicts it.

maybe decision will be to double | character in the INI? as for \ character

I'm performing my second differential backup (the basefile and first differential went fine) but it exits too soon after creating an 88-89Mb Zip file (which is only a few percent into the job).

I thought that perhaps there was a file that Toucan didn't like and deleted the files where the program exited but on retry the backup just ended on a file soon after. I then deleted a bunch of folders after and before the point where it exited yet the program did get further again but still exited early on the 88-89Mb mark.