4. ViceVersa

ViceVersa

ViceVersa fits into the left (source) / right (target) category of synchronization tools, though you may not realize that from the initial screen. You start with a simple small dialog box with the top for source and the bottom for target. Seems easy enough right?

In fact, it’s significantly more complex and powerful. As soon as you hit the “Compare” button, a new window pops up showing the familiar left/right setup that you might have expected. But instead of the simple setup of say GoodSync or Allways Sync, which shows simple arrows to indicate synchronization direction, the two sides in the Vice Versa equation are not as well linked. You actually have to look at each entry and see if you’ve got a check mark or not (indicating whether the item is synced) instead of simply looking at the middle of the left/right dialog box.

That minor usability issue aside, ViceVersa offers an impressive array of synchronization options. Multiple synchronization targets are possible with ViceVersa, allowing you to have one source that is then synced up with as many target directories as you want.

There is also a Time Synchronization option that lets ViceVersa synchronize your PC’s system clock to a known time server, to ensure that your time is accurate.

Password protection is also a neat little feature that could be extremely useful in multi-user environments. It enables the user to set a password so that synchronization operations cannot be modified without authorization.

Scheduling options are very robust with ViceVersa, with an almost overwhelming array of choices and methods. In fact, there are three separate tools that users can employ to set up synchronization scheduling: VVScheduler, VVLauncher and VVengine. It’s really not that hard, in general, to set up a synchronization schedule, and no other tool we tested provided three different separate tools for the purpose. To make matters even more confusing, VVengine is actually a separate download-at a separate cost as well. Frankly, this represents a lot of needless complexity for something that really should be baked into the core product as an easy to use feature.