Instead of creating many sync items with the same settings that only differ in the selected directories, you can create a single sync item with the common parent directory. This way, you don’t need to run each individual sync item. For example, if you only want to sync your Documents, Music and Pictures directories but…

.Library and .Trash are system directories inside your home directory. SyncTime doesn’t have enough privileges to access these directories. You can exclude these system directories with a File or directory or Hidden filter. If listed in the confirmation dialog, you can right-click them to open the context menu and select Add selected files to the filter. Tip: if you want…

In general, SyncTime should be compatible with Cryptomator. There is a Cryptomator issue that causes images in a vault in iCloud Drive to not be copied correctly, which I reported in January 2023: https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator/issues/2650

If you select the ~/Library/Mail directory as a source (where ~ represents your home directory), the sync should run without issues. On the other hand, selecting one of its ancestors, like ~/Library, can cause scan errors. In general, selecting a directory in an open panel grants an app access to all subfiles and subdirectories, but…

SyncTime syncs the source with the destination. It does not sync the source with the file inside the destination that has the same name as the source; doing so would make it less flexible as it wouldn’t allow to sync files with different names. When the source is a directory, you can easily create one…

Files extracted from an archive have particular permissions that prevent SyncTime from accessing them before the process has completed. Only when the process has completed SyncTime is able to access the extracted files without errors. There are some workarounds:

SyncTime itself does not use encryption, but you can encrypt the destination volume and protect it with a password. When connecting a password-protected volume, you’ll be asked by macOS to enter the password; you can also store the password in the keychain so that you don’t have to enter it every time when connecting it…

At the core, both apps create copies of your data. Time Machine is designed to create incremental backups of your Mac. SyncTime can do that too (although it’s not allowed to access some system files), but it can also synchronize files and allows you to customize various settings depending on your needs. Time Machine is…