The first contains the source files and folders, and the third contains the destination files and folders. The left hand side is where backup jobs are stored, but we do not have any yet. It warns you that the app is from an unknown developer, but I have tried it and found it to be OK, so open it anyway.

The folder or the files can be copied to the Mac’s Applications folder.ĭouble click the FreeFileSync app and if it will not open (OS X can be configured only to open apps from the Mac app store in System Preferences), right click or Ctrl+click the file and select Open. Go and download FreeFileSync, it is free open source software, and double click it to extract the contents from the zip file.

You can sync any folders and the ones you choose will be different to mine. This is so that I can sync these two folders on the Mac’s internal disk with the ones on the NAS disk. You can create folders on the NAS drive in the usual way and in the next screenshot a Documents folder and a Google Drive folder have been created. On older versions of OS X you might find that you need go to the Go menu and select Connect to Server, then enter the NAS drive’s IP address to connect to it. This one is listed in the Shared section of the Finder sidebar (bottom left corner in the screenshot above), and selecting it shows the folders on the NAS drive. There is a special area for them in the sidebar. If you are running the latest version of OS X, you should find that NAS drives simply show up in Finder windows. Time Machine is useful for making backups and SuperDuper is useful for cloning the disk drive, but neither of them is useful if you have a shared disk drive, such as a NAS drive on the network.Ī NAS drive could be used to provide shared files for several Macs and PCs, or it could be used to store music, photos and videos for streaming over the Wi-Fi network. If you have an external disk drive such as a USB disk or even a NAS (network attached storage) disk, there are many uses for it and, for example, you could sync folders on the Mac's disk with it.

Sync programs mac external drives