Scanning is Hard Work

What's the first thing that happens when you run a backup? The software scans your system to find out what's changed. (If you're lucky. Some software just blindly copies everything, taking a good portion of eternity in the process.)

This is a huge win over copying each file, of course, but boy does it take a while. Even if you've only changed one file, it still has to look at every single file and folder on the disk, and an average machine will have hundreds of thousands of files on it. If only there were some way to skip this step...

Work Smarter

Enter ZeroScan. Think of ZeroScan as your own personal assistant who follows you around and discreetly takes notes on which files you change. When the time comes to run your backup, ZeroScan tears off that sheet of paper and hands it to Synk's engine, and just like that it's good to go. No extra work; it already knows what needs to be updated and copied, and what's already up to date. Zero scanning.

Think Fast

With the power of ZeroScan behind it, Synk 6 is fast. How fast? Very, very fast. See the column at right, "ZeroScan—By the Numbers," for specific examples, but backups and synchronizations with ZeroScan take only as much time and memory as it takes to actually copy the files, without all of the administrative overhead that used to be necessary.

And don't be concerned about the "note-taking" making your system slower, either. ZeroScan is based on one of the technologies underlying Spotlight for change detection, making it essentially free to find the changes. The note storage itself uses advanced new data management frameworks introduced with Tiger, and as a result, the entire operation is several times cheaper than Spotlight's own bookkeeping. (In fact, ZeroScan's note-taking produced no measurable slowdown in our tests here on a variety of operations.)

So What's the Catch?

ZeroScan only functions if you don't go behind its back and change things. In other words, if changes are made to your data through other computers besides the one that ZeroScan is running on, then you'll have to leave ZeroScan disabled. You'll still get all of the benefits of a standard incremental backup, though.

For everyone else, well, it's a good day. We've been using Synk 6 internally for a while during development, and we've been surprised at the difference in workflow it makes when it's so fast and cheap to run a backup. Download any of the Synk 6 applications and give ZeroScan a try. You'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Welcome to the next generation of backup and synchronization technology.