Syncovery can copy NTFS security along with files.

On the tab sheet Special in the profiles, you will find a checkmark called “Process Security and Shares”. On the dialog that pops up, you need at least three checkmarks on the left-hand side (Copy Owner/Group/Permissions).

If the source and destination base folders do not have the same permissions yet, you need to also choose “Process Base Folder Too”. This feature will make sure that the destination base folder has the same permissions as the source folder, so that all subfolders and files can inherit from that. If necessary, Syncovery will break the inheritance on the destination base folder so it can make the permissions match. It will not break inheritance on any subfolders, unless their inheritance is also broken on the source side.

In addition, the program needs to be running “As Administrator”. To ensure it runs as admin, you need to right-click its icon and choose
“Run As Administrator”, unless you have Windows versions older than Vista, or you have disabled UAC.

If using the scheduler, it probably needs to run as a service. Please see
Installing the scheduler as a service

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FAQ: is the Syncovery license perpetual or per year?

It is a perpetual license. There are no yearly recurring fees. You can also use the registration code again after replacing a computer, without any additional fees. When replacing a computer, simply uninstall the software and use your registration code again on the new one.

Updates and upgrades of the software are included for two years. After that, you can still use the last version you got, or if you decide to upgrade to the newer version that we may be offering, 50% of your original payment will be credited against the new order, so in most cases, the new licenses costs 50% of the regular price.

If a license hasn’t been upgraded in many years, the upgrade cost may rise to 75% of the regular price.

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When you create several profiles using the same cloud storage, you will notice that they automatically connect to the same account. This affects OAuth cloud storage such as Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox etc.

However, it is also possible to use different accounts for different profiles.

Each cloud account needs to be identified on the Internet Protocol Settings dialog, using the Account (opt.) field. You could enter the email addresses there or anything else. What you enter does not directly mean anything, it is just a name under which the cloud authentication tokens are saved.

Then when you click the Browse button, an Internet Browser window will appear, asking you to authenticate the user. On this screen, the previous user may appear, so you need to click “Not me” or something like that in order to log the previous user out and log the new one in.

If a profile should be associated with a different account, just change the Account ID to something else, and you will have the chance to re-authenticate it.

If you want to completely re-assign your jobs, you can use the button “Forget Cloud Access Tokens” on the Program Settings dialog, tab sheet “Cloud”.

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There are several ways to run jobs one at a time.

Running profiles with the scheduler running one job at a time

One way to run jobs one after another is to use the Scheduler. Give them a scheduled time and leave a minute between each profile. On the Scheduler tab sheet, click on the Tools and Settings button and uncheck “Start Profiles In Parallel”. Alternatively, go to the Program Settings dialog, tab sheet Advanced, and specify 1 for Max. simultaneous jobs.

Running profiles via manual invocation

For manual runs, select the profiles in the Overview, right-click the selection and choose “Run in Unattended Mode”. This will run them one after another, as opposed to “Run in Background”.

If you need Syncovery to do other things while the jobs are running, you can open Syncovery a second time.

Chaining profiles directly

Another way is to chain profiles. As an “after” command line in “Execute before/after” you can put:
RUN PROFILE Profile Name

This will start the next profile when the first one has finished, and so forth. The problem is that the chaining is always done, so it may be a problem if there is an occasion where you want to run only one of the chained jobs.

Using the command line

Yet another way is to use the Syncovery command line and invoke your jobs from a batch file or script:
Syncovery Command Line

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You can automatically delete files based on certain criteria with Syncovery. A frequently requested functionality is to delete files from a folder which are older than X days.

To delete files, you need to set up a job (profile) and mirror an empty folder to the destination using Exact Mirror Mode. For example, you can use a File Age filter to delete files older than 14 days only. You need to use Advanced Mode in Syncovery to do this.

After setting the job up with the correct filters, you need to test it in Attended Mode. Run the job manually and look at the Sync Preview to make sure it works correctly and deletes the correct files only. Then you can give it a schedule.

If you have thoroughly verified that the profile works 100% correctly, and does not delete any files that you want to keep, then go to Safety->Unattended and allow 100% deletions (because 100% of the older files are deleted).

To enable these deletions to occur in unattended mode, you also need to add a switch to the INI file. Add the following line to the [Main] section of the Syncovery.ini file (on Windows) in order to enable 100% deletions:

UnattendedDeleteAllIsOK_IfDelPercIs100=YES

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Syncovery supports various providers of S3 compatible storage.

Since version 9.33, Syncovery comes with a list of S3 servers to choose from, as well as a Custom setting to specify any server URL. The list is available in the Windows and macOS Desktop GUIs. On Linux, please specify bucketname@server.url to access non-AWS servers.

These are the S3 providers that Syncovery has been tested with, in alphabetical order:

• Amazon AWS
• Digital Ocean Spaces
• DreamHost
• Google Cloud Storage
• Linode Object Storage
• Scaleway Object Storage
• Storadera
• Wasabi

Some of these providers work with multiple different S3 API endpoints, and you’ll get a pop-up info box about how to specify the bucket along with the endpoint.

If you don’t get that message, it is sufficient to specify or choose the bucket only, and Syncovery already knows the server URL.

For Google Cloud Storage, there’s also the native API option, which you can choose as an alternative to S3. It has a few advantages over the S3 API, but when authorizing Syncovery via OAuth2, you need to confirm a warning that Syncovery hasn’t been verified by Google for this API. Google have fully approved Syncovery for use with Google Drive, but for Google Cloud Storage, the approval is more difficult to get because the OAuth mechanism would provide “too broad” control over the storage. We are therefore working on an alternative authorization method for Google Cloud Storage.

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Since version 9.40, Syncovery supports a safer way to store your passwords.

You have the choice between different safety levels:

• Legacy Encryption (Weak)
• Automatic Key Tied to This Computer (Medium Safe)
• Automatic Key Tied to This Windows User (Medium Safe)
• Password Phrase (High Safety if a good password is chosen)

The safest encryption would require you to enter your encryption password every time you open Syncovery or start the scheduler. This is probably not feasible for servers, but you can also choose to store the settings encryption password in the Windows Credential Manager. Then it would work on servers, even after a reboot and if the scheduler runs as a service.

For medium safety (which should be good enough for many use cases), you can let Syncovery automatically generate an encryption key tied to your computer, or tied to to your user account on that computer.

These encryption methods also work when the scheduler runs as a service, and even if it runs under a different account. The service will communicate with the Syncovery GUI so that it gets access to the information needed to generate the encryption keys.

You can also choose to store passwords in the Windows Credential Manager (or just the main encryption password). Passwords in the Windows Credential Manager cannot be easily stolen even by malicious software on your computer, because these passwords are not given to the credential manager in plain text. Instead, they in turn are encrypted in a way that is tied to the machine. So if a password is extracted from Windows Credential Manager and added on another machine, it will not work. Even a hacker cannot easily extract plain text Syncovery passwords from Windows Credential Manager.

The detailed choices for encryption can be found on the first tab sheet of the Program Settings dialog.

The encryption algorithm used is AES-256.

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Need to exchange files via PGP encryption and SFTP or other Internet Protocols? Syncovery is the ideal tool for such requirements.

If you regularly need to receive a PGP encrypted file, download it and decrypt it, you can set up a simple Syncovery profile to perform the task. It can do the opposite as well: encrypt a file with PGP and send it using Internet protocols like SFTP and others.

As a reminder, you need a Private Key to decrypt PGP files, and a Public Key to encrypt them.

Here’s how to set up the Syncovery profile. On the left side, you will usually specify your local folder, or a UNC path that corresponds to a folder in your network. On the right side, you would set up the Internet protocol. Click the Internet button and change the protocol from FTP to the one you need (such a SSH/SFTP), and specify the credentials.

For a profile that PGP-encrypts files and sends them via SFTP, the top of the Syncovery profile dialog will look similar to this:

The PGP encryption is chosen in the Advanced Settings category “Compress/Encrypt”, on the tab sheet “Encryption”:

When you click on the checkbox “Encrypt PGP…”, a dialog box will appear where you are asked to paste the Public Key that should be used for encryption. You should have received the public key from the person or company you will be sending files to. It will look similar to this:

Conversely, if you are going to receive PGP encrypted files, you would choose “Decrypt PGP…” and paste your Private Key into the dialog box.

When decrypting PGP files, you can choose if you want to keep the PGP file itself too, or just the decrypted file. The main reason for keeping the PGP file, too, is to prevent Syncovery from re-downloading the same file again the next time when the job is executed.

It may not be necessary to keep the encrypted PGP file, for example:

• if you want to download the same file every time
• if you download once per day, and there’s a different file on the server every day
• if you use a date/time filter such as File Age: less than 24 hours old
• if you use SmartTracking to remember which files have already been downloaded
• or, if you copy from a local or UNC path rather than an Internet Protocol, you can use the two Archive Flag filter checkboxes on the General Filters tab sheet to mark files as processed and avoid re-copying them

If the decrypted file is a zip file, you can also let Syncovery unpack it. The checkbox for unzipping can be found at the bottom of the tab sheet “Compression”. Again you have the choice to keep the zip file after unpacking. In this case there is no reason to keep it really:

The post Automatic PGP File Exchange (Encryption/Decryption) via SFTP and other protocols (Upload/Download) appeared first on File Sync & Backup Software | Syncovery.