While looking for an easier way to backup and sync a couple of folders on my system I came across an awesomely named command line function called robocopy¹. One of the things I use it for is to quickly backup the source of my Jekyll site to a folder on my Dropbox with a simple command like this:

robocopy ~/Jekyll ~/Dropbox/Jekyll *.* /mir

As you can see it follows the structure of robocopy -source -destination -file -option. The *.* targets every single filetype and the /mir means that everything, including the subfolders, will get mirrored. There’s a lot of options for it², ranging from copying a single file once to actually scheduling it for repeated copying. It’s not really a syncing function per se, but it works and it’s blazingly fast. I’m not really bothered by the fact that I have to manually run it either since I don’t need to sync everytime something changes.

The biggest advantage of using Robocopy is that it’s just a lot more smoother, especially since I’ve gotten more and more comfortable using the command line for everyday tasks. I can open up the CLI from anywhere, trigger a hotstring for pasting the above snippet and just hit Enter.