General information for schools and businesses seeking efficient backup solutions, at no cost (at all)

License information

The terms of the GNU GPL, under which Create Synchronicity is licensed, specifically specify that it can be used free of charge anywhere, including for commercial or educative use. It can furthermore be modified to fit your particular needs, as the code relies on a very flexible structure.

Create Synchronicity is the work of one passionate individual, and many translators. If you feel that this effort should be rewarded, please do make a contribution; your help is mostly appreciated.

Why use open source software instead of proprietary software?

There are many reasons to move to open source, the most important one of which being the cost: it's free! Other reasons include:

• First, open source software evolves much faster that closed-source, paying alternatives. When a bug is found, a fix to the problem is usually published in the following week. On the opposite, most commercial applications will require that you buy a new version of the application instead, generating substancial costs which are hardly conciliable with tigh budget constraints.
• Second, most commercial applications base their marketing on unverifiable claims. They pretend to produce reliable backups, but the definition of "reliable" is unclear; open source applications on the opposite let you check the code of the application, and decide for yourself if you want to use it or not. In many cases, people before you have checked the code to verifiy that it was safe.
• Third, open source software can be adapted. If the very specific needs of your environment require very specific changes to the program, they can be done at any time, by anyone.
• Fourth, open source software means community. That is, when you search for support regarding an application, people will be much more eager to help you, having the feeling that they participate to an open movement, instead of thinking that they are doing for free the job of technicians that a company pays to do. This means overall better support experiences.
• Fifth, open source programs are usually more accessible to disabled users, and their situation has been taken into account in designing the application. Since ensuring accessibility requires extra time and efforts, most commercial companies don't have enough time to ensure such accessibility. Open source developers, on the other hand, usually do take the time to implement the necessary functions.

Overall, moving to open source means zero costs, higher adapability, higher productivity, better support, and an overall better experience.

Why use backup software?

Your data is never safe from a hard drive failure, as most people learn the hard way. Recovery services are extremely costly, take lots of time, and substancial efforts, whereas restoring a backup takes no longer than copying your files back in place.

Your computer may also be lost, stolen , or broken; sometimes, things just stop working, and you find that your documents are simply gone.

Sometimes, you will accidentally delete a file, and in many cases you will not manage to recover it.

Backing up your files and important data is the only way to prevent such data losses.

Why use Create Synchronicity?

Create Synchronicity is safe.

Create Synchronicity was designed with security in mind. Files are copied first, and only then are obsolete files deleted. The program has been written to never delete anything in the source folder. This prevents implementing two-way mirrors, but in turn it improves data security a lot.

Create Synchronicity is fast.

Every bit of Create Synchronicity has been optimized for speed. It uses a more efficient algorithm than most of its competitors, which uses a little extra RAM, but spares lots of drive accesses. Backups are thus faster and more efficient.

Create Synchronicity is simple.

Create synchronicity is easy to learn and use, and has been packed with neat functions. See the features list for more information. IT professional, you will find more on extra features in the "advanced" section of the manual

Create Synchronicity has a full manual.

The manual of Create Synchronicity describes everything that can be done, from common operations to advanced features. It is available online, or as a separate download. Even the manual is open source!

Why would we use Create Synchronicity at school?

If you want to show your students what a backup is, or provide them with efficient tools to focus more on their work, and less on copying their files, Create Synchronicity may be a good option. It's interface is really simple, and the options are pretty clear.

You may also want to show your students the variety of software that exists on the internet; present them with the idea of open source software, and so on.

You may also simply want to schedule backup at school level. Create Synchronicity can sync files to NAS drives, on your school network, and thus can greatly ease your work as a network admin.

And at work?

Unless your company designs backup solutions, it's most likely that you have no time to waste setting up your backups. But you may want precise control over what is mirrored on your backup servers, use the program as a command line tool, scheduler daily, weekly, or monthly backup, and then forget about it, knowing that you can rely on an efficient backup solution; Create Synchronicity is intended to answer these needs. It's very stable, thouroughly tested, and widely used. In fact, is was born out of frustration that backup tools would take so long to configure and set up, whereas they only provided you with little options.

Remember that this is free software!

If you find that this software helps you in your business, at school, or at home, you may want to support my work by donating! You could for example calculate 10% of the amounts you've saved by not buying commercial backup software, and instead use this money to give this application a thumbs up! You can read more on donations if you want.