Command Line Usage

FreeFileSync supports additional synchronization scenarios via a command line interface. To get a syntax overview, open the console, go to the directory where FreeFileSync is installed and type:

1. Run a FreeFileSync batch job

In order to start synchronization in batch mode, supply the path of a ffs_batch configuration file as the first argument for FreeFileSync.exe:

Return Codes
0 - Synchronization completed successfully
1 - Synchronization completed with warnings
2 - Synchronization completed with errors
3 - Synchronization was aborted

You can evaluate these codes from a script (e.g. a cmd or bat file on Windows) and check if synchronization completed successfully:

"C:\Program Files\FreeFileSync\FreeFileSync.exe" "D:\Backup Projects.ffs_batch"
if errorlevel 1 (
  ::if return code is 1 or greater, something went wrong, add special treatment here
  echo Errors occurred during synchronization...
  pause
)

Instead of showing an error message, you can also send an email notification (using a third party tool).

Attention
If you are running the batch job unattended, make sure your script is not blocked showing a notification dialog. Consider the following options when setting up the FreeFileSync batch job:

Set When finished to Exit to skip the summary dialog after synchronization.
Set up error handling to Ignore errors or Cancel to stop the synchronization at the first error.

2. Start a FreeFileSync GUI configuration

If you pass a ffs_gui file, FreeFileSync will start in GUI mode and immediately start comparison (but only if all directories exist):

3. Customize an existing configuration

You can replace the directories of a given ffs_gui or ffs_batch configuration file by using the -DirPair parameter:

FreeFileSync.exe "D:\Manual Backup.ffs_gui" -dirpair C:\NewSource D:\NewTarget

4. Merge multiple configurations

When more than one configuration file is provided, FreeFileSync will merge everything into a single configuration with multiple folder pairs and start in GUI mode:

5. Use a different GlobalSettings.xml file

By default, FreeFileSync uses a single GlobalSettings.xml file containing options that apply to all synchronization tasks; for examples see Expert Settings. If you want FreeFileSync to use a different settings file instead, you can specify the path via command line: