Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 1.3.015

Description: File Hamster provides real-time backup, archiving, and version tracking for files and folders. It is a memory-resident application that will monitor the folders and files that you ask it to and invisibly keep a copy whenever you change thse (such as saving or overwriting them), so that you can revert to the old version(s) if you ever need to. It also gives you the ability to create notes on-the-fly whenever you make a change.

Here’s how this program works:

• The first thing you have to do after installation is tell File Hamster which individual files and/or folder to monitor. For folders, you can tell it which file types you want monitored and/or excluded. It can also watch sub-folders recursively.
• File Hamster will now monitor these files in real time at all times. Any attempt to change or overwrite these files will prompt File Hamster to instantly make a copy of the file before allowing the change. This will result in a trail of incremental on-the-fly backups of your files that are done invisibly without any user intervention.
• File Hamster will flash a little window close to the system tray whenever it detects a change. You can use this window to quickly leave comments or notes if you need to that you can refer to later on.
• The process of making backups is remarkably fast and streamlined . This is the case even for large files that take quite a bit of time to be saved from the application that is working with them.
• All historic versions of the file can then be accessed if need be from the File Hamster main dialog (see screenshot).
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Rating: 4

Version tested: 1.0

Description: Disc Space Reporter is a small program that can provide insight on the files and folders on your hard drive that are taking up most of the physical space. It features a simple user interface that represents file/folder sizes using little bars in the detail view, as well as an overall top ranking of the largest individual files in the scanned hard drives.

Here’s what you need to know about this program:

• It is a small executable that does not need installation and has a very light footprint.
• Very fast scanning of hard drives.
• What I really like about this program is that it contains a special pane that presents you with a ranking of the top files that are taking up space across all the scanned hard drives and folder. This is simply a great idea and I am surprised that more programs in this category dont have it (as opposed to having to drill into drives and folders using bars and pie charts to identify the culprits). It will ask you at the outset the number of top files you want displayed (i.e. top 10, 20, 30, or whatever you want).
• Size is represented using little bars in the detail view. There are 2 columns that contain these bars, one representing the relative size of the file/folder within the folder that it resides in, and another one that is an absolute representation in relation to all the hard drive contents.
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Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 4.2a

Description: TrueCrypt is a free, open source encryption program. It works by mounting an encrypted file as a virtual hard drive and encrypting/decypting all read/write operations on-the-fly. It can also encrypt entire partitions or storage mediums such as USB drives, memory sticks, and floppy disks.

This is how this program works:

• Encryption Algorythms: TrueCrypt offers a number of encryption alogorythms including Blowfish, Serpent, Twofish, CAST5 and others. It will also allow the use of a so-called cascade of different ciphers; i.e. applying a number of these sequentially (If you don’t know what any of this means forget it; its just to say that the data is EXTREMELY secure).
• Creation of an encrypted file: you’ll have to determine how much encrypted storage you want. If, say, you choose to create a 100 meg volume you will have to create a 100 meg file somewhere on you hard drive. The contents of this file will be completely inaccessible when TrueCrypt is not mounting/decrypting it (including file and folder names and structure). Someone snooping around your computer might see that the file is there, but it will look like random data. If you want to make the file hidden from the file system, you can either use TrueCrypt to encrypt an entire partition or put your file on a hidden partition (hiding/unhiding partitions is a simple Windows registry function; a program like TweakUI can do it; to create a partition you can use Gparted).
• USB drives: TrueCrypt needs to either be installed on the machine on which you wish to view the data, or otherwise can be available on the USB drive in portable format. For a tutorial on how to do this go here; or go here for a nice script that can help you out. Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.1.1.b56

Description: Selfimage is an open source hard drive imaging utility that can create, compress and restore an image of a hard drive or partition. This is useful for backing up a hard drive as well as restoring it to an earlier state.

This program has some really cool features, as follows:

• Can create an image file of a partition that is currently in use.
• Can create an image of an entire hard drive including master boot record and all partitions (and partition table).
• Can create images that Windows doesn’t recognize or isn’t mounting; i.e. you can use Selfimage to manage images of partitions in a multi-OS PC.
• Can restore an image to any partition  -  even mounted ones - that doesn’t have open files. Read more »

Rating: 4

Version tested: 2.0 beta

Description: IOBit SmartDefrag is a hard disk defragmenter that can be used to defragment your hard drive on-demand or it can work in the background, continuously degragmenting your hard drive whenever your computer’s resources are available.

Depending on your usage, defragmenting your hard drive can be one of the most significant interventions you can do that can have a noticeable impact on increasing your computer’s performance, as hard drives can often act as a bottleneck for the entire system. There are a number of free tools you can use to do this including Auslogic’s free Disk Defrag, as well as IOBit SmartDefrag.

There is some debate, however, as to the advantage of using any of the above free tools versus simply using windows XP’s own Defrag utility, which is based on the Diskeeper engine. This tends to be a very subjective issue, as I did some research into this and was not able to find any comparative testing or hard numbers that might shed light on this. (Numbers aside, both seem to me to be much faster than the Windows tool). Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.0.10

Description: Gmail Drive Shell Extension creates a virtual hard drive on your computer that uses your gmail account to store files and folders

Very simply, this program creates a hard drive icon in “My Computer” that you can use to store files and folders that (behind the scenes) are actually uploaded as emails into your gmail account. This is what you need to know about this software:

• You can drag and drop files into your gmail drive much like any other drive.
• Uploaded files will materialize in your gmail account as individual emails with attachments. You can actually open your account and download these files, which means that you can retrieve your files from any computer even if it does not have Gmail Drive installed. Read more »

Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 3.3.0

Description: GParted Live CD is a powerful full-featured partition management software that can create, resize, check, copy, merge, and destroy partitions, and supports multiple file systems.

This is a really good open source partition management software that is very simple and has a self explanatory interface. It can format and perform operations on a all the major file systems (including FAT32 and NTFS). Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.2.85

Description: JDiskReport is a program that can perform a scan and generate detailed reports on the sizes of files and folders that exist on your hard drive.

If you think you know exactly what files and folders occupy the most space on your hard drive you are probably mistaken. JDiskReport is a program that can tell you exactly where all of hard drive capacity is being used up. It can do this from a hi-level macro perspective and allow you to drill down to any level of detail that you want.

This program will generate pie charts, ring charts, bar charts, or file/folder lists (all of these are sortable by size). It can also create a number of reports such as: top 100 largets files report, reports showing the distribution of files sizes and distribution of modification dates, and a report that shows the distribution of files by type. For example, I learned that the largest chunk of files on my hard drive were .mp3 files, followed by .xls files (not very useful perhaps but interesting).

As a freeware program this is a full-featured program and probably the best in its category; here’s what I like about it: Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  2.2

Description: Undelete Plus is an award winning free program that can recover deleted files after they have been deleted. It can also wipe files that remain on your hard drive so they cannot be recovered.

You are looking for a file all over your hard drive, when it suddenly dawns on you that you had accidentally deleted the last version of it. What to do now?

Enter Undelete Plus, a small utility that will scan your hard drive for all files that can be undeleted and attempt to salvage the file for you. Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.0.3.173

Description: Auslogic Disk Defrag is a freeware disk defragmentation tool that seems to be significantly faster than Microsoft’s defrag.

The Auslogics claim that this program is a very fast disk defragmenter; however, I have not found any figures as to how much faster than defrag this is supposed to be. What I do know, however, is that the defragmentation process with this program feels pretty darn speedy just to observe. Read more »