Creating a port for an application is a difficult task. Successful cross-platform applications, such as Mozilla Thunderbird, uTorrent, and Google Chrome, benefit from a long and well-supported development period. Grsync, a GUI for the excellent rsync, is a useful and capable backup and sync application in Linux. Having used the application in openSUSE, Mandriva, and Ubuntu over the years, I have come to depend on it for backing up to my Toshiba Mobile HDD and my Buffalo Desktop HDD. I was happy to find that Grsync was available for Windows in Soureforge and tested out the application for two weeks.
Grsync in Windows did not work as well as its Linux counterpart. Like other cross-platform utilities from Linux's vast application library (e.g. Handbrake), Grsync implementation in Windows had the same interface as found in Linux. Unfortunately, the success rate of backups in my tests wasn't nearly as impressive.
Launching Grysnc in Windows 7 triggers a blank DOS terminal in the background. On several runs, a simple backup task between a Windows 7 Downloads folder and an external hard drive stalled midway through leaving blank folders in the target destination. The sync would typically falter at 60% or so after a very fast start (as expected from a rsync transfer). Users would be left wondering as the file transfer halts at a particular document or image. Closing the application doesn't trigger errors when Grysnc for Windows crashes, but with data integrity at risk, I would advise using Windows-based synchronization applications over Grsync for Windows. To be fair, Sourceforge.net lists Grsync for Windows as a beta release and plenty of other users were happy with the utility. As for now though, I can't really recommend using Grsync for Windows in a production environment.
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