I, for one, needed my PDF slides to review for class so I definitely needed to find a way to sync it to my Acer tablet. Dropbox is my preferred syncing service, which works wonders on computers. However on mobile devices, especially Android devices, it leaves a lot to be desired, mainly because of the lack of support for two-way syncing goodness.

Dropbox may or may not implement this feature soon, but in the meantime, Dropsync does a superb job of uploading and downloading files in real-time (Pro version), or other intervals if you so prefer. If you use Dropbox, this app might just make your mobile life easier.

Dropbox doesn’t just shine for syncing files so you’ll have the same set on different devices that you own, but it’s also great for backing up those same files in case of any emergency. It’s not the only one that does that either. SpiderOak and SugarSync are also excellent syncing services with mobile apps, and while I tried all three services, I stuck with Dropbox because it had virtually no learning curve, it had clients for all three OSes that I’m familiar with, and it synced things without noticeable delay.

There are two versions of Dropsync, free and pro. The version I’m testing here is the pro version that’s available for $5.99 on the Android Market.

Syncing SD Card Folders With Dropbox Folders

When you download and launch Dropsync, there’s not much to see beyond the status and preferences screens. The first screen shows the status of your syncs, how much has been transferred to your device or to Dropbox’s servers, as you can see in the next cropped screenshot.

If you tap on Settings, that’s where it gets a bit more interesting.

You can choose which SD card folder to sync with which Dropbox folder in the Settings.

If you’re using this on a mobile phone and need to set limits on how much data you’re consuming with this app, you can set file size limits for all the files you’re transferring whether they going from or to your Android device.

If you’re watching your limits, it’s probably good to uncheck the Instant Upload option, which uploads and downloads changes in any modified files in real-time (pro version only). You can also set Dropsync to sync every 15 minutes, 1 hour to once a day.

This app is not optimized for tablets. In fact, you’ll notice it allows you to set whether transfers occur via Wi-Fi or your mobile data connection.

Other options include whether to offer notifications on each sync. I’ve used this app for a semester and would recommend to uncheck that option as it gets tiring to have to clear that message on a tablet, where there’s no “Clear All” button, at least not on my tablet as far as I know.

Differences Between Free And Pro Versions

There are several differences between the free and the pro version. First, as I’ve mentioned, real-time syncing is only available for users with the pro key.

There are also more size limits you can pick from so only files up to a certain file size are allowed to be transferred, which is handy especially if you’re on a data plan with caps.

Apart from having no ads, the last benefit of the pro version is that you can sync more than one pair of folders, which for me was the main reason I needed to purchase this version. Having relied on this pro version for over a semester, I think it just allowed for fewer headaches and more efficiency.

There are a number of similar apps that can sync your Android device with your computer. Which are the applications  you prefer? Let us know in the comments section below.

This is great when you’re playing file janitor for a day, cutting, copying and inevitably deleting files and folders you no longer need. Unfortunately getting the data back isn’t quite as easy as a trip to the Recycle Bin. You’ll need some recovery software, something like Pandora Recovery. Breathe. Relax. Let’s recover some data.

A Few Things To Remember

When a file is deleted, Windows usually sends the item to the Recycle Bin where it is marked for deletion but still very much on your drive. Once you’ve emptied the Recycle Bin the file is seemingly lost. Shift+Del is simply a handy shortcut to skip the Bin and zap a file.

However, just because the file or folder has been deleted does not mean your data has been destroyed. When a file is “deleted”, Windows simply marks that section of the hard drive as free, writable space. Provided you’ve not filled up the drive a few times, it’s very likely you’ll be able to recover those files.

This does of course mean that old hard drives, memory cards, flash drives and any other rewritable storage medium is subject to the same rules. If you format and sell an old SD card there’s every chance the buyer could attempt a recovery and enjoy your holiday snaps too. Regardless of how likely it is that someone would do this, it’s still very much possible.

Install Pandora Recovery

Assuming you’ve just lost a couple of vital documents, you’ll probably want to protect the medium they were stored on. Don’t write to the drive, don’t move or copy items and ensure you have at least enough free space on a separate drive for the files you want to recover.

Recovering files to the same drive that you are recovering from is possibly going to end in tears as your files have now been marked as free space, meaning it’s possible that you’ll overwrite the same files you’re trying to cover and lose your data. Don’t do it – recover to another drive and then put your files back where they belong.

If you’re recovering from your system drive then it’s probably a good idea to not install Pandora in this location, in case you overwrite the data. If you’re reading this without the need for an immediate recovery then ask yourself if you’re better off installing the software before you genuinely need it. Otherwise, choose another partition or better still prepare a portable USB install on another PC. It is also possible to buy a ready-to-rock USB version of Pandora for around $20.

You can grab Pandora here, choose Download.com as a mirror and click the Direct Download Now link below the CNET Installer link. CNET Installer will attempt to install crapware on your PC (you have to agree, but it’s quite a confusing dialogue) in addition to the Ask.com toolbar you should probably refuse in the main installer.

Once Pandora is installed or available as a portable app you’re ready to recover.

The Recovery Process

Recovering data with Pandora is fairly simple, and the first thing you’ll see is a wizard that attempts to guide you through the process. Follow the wizard and after choosing a drive you’ll be asked whether you want to browse for deleted files, search or conduct a deep surface scan.

Browse is great if you know where the data went missing from, and probably returns the quickest results. If you’re after a particular file then searching either for a matching name or simply by extension like *.avi or *.jpg will yield results. If your drive has been formatted, has corrupted file tables, is a removable/flash storage medium or everything else has failed then a deep surface scan is your best option.

You can easily skip between the functions in their respective tabs, and the recovery process is identical for all three methods. Once you have located a file or folder you would like to recover simply right click and choose Recover to… from the menu.

A dialogue box will pop-up requesting a location to store recovered data, remember: if you’re recovering from an external hard drive – copy to your main drive. If you’re recovering from system drive – recover to a USB or external drive. Do not write to your source drive.

Depending on how much data is being recovered you may have to wait a while. Recovering 17GB of video took me about 45 minutes, whereas a small file (documents or images) takes seconds. Once you’re done you’ll hopefully see something resembling the screen below.

Conclusion

Remember, if you can’t find your data with a search or browse then a deep surface scan is highly recommended. I deleted a few files to test the program and not only did it find the images I purposefully deleted but a lot of old music, video and image files from before my last format.

If you’ve tried Pandora Recovery and are still having problems then all is not lost. Maybe you’ll have some joy with another recommended recovery program. There is also a detailed FAQ regarding Pandora here.

If you have any thoughts on this or other data recovery tools then add your comments, below.

You can’t edit formatted documents with this tool, but if you at least do your first drafts in TXT files you’ll find this tool useful. Even better, it connects with Dropbox, meaning your work will sync with all of your computers. Jessica pointed this tool out when she showed you how to edit and compile code online, but TextDropApp isn’t just useful for programmers. It’s also perfect for the writer on the move.

Using TextDropApp

Ready to check this out? Just head over to TextDropApp, click the “login” button and you will be re-directed to Dropbox. You will have to log into Dropbox, assuming you’re not already, and then you will need to give TextDropApp permission to read and edit your documents.

This makes sense: the app can hardly edit anything without permission. Still, some people might be worried. That’s smart, but according to the app’s creator Sam Nguyen, there’s not much to worry about:

TextDrop does not save your password. It doesn’t even see your password because it uses Dropbox’s OAuth system.

So rest assured, your password is safe. TextDropApp, as a text editor, is very low-frills. You can’t customize much of anything, and there is no code syntax highlighting. This is a simple tool for simple purposes.

The minimalist interface works well on a variety of devices, so give it a try on your tablet or your smartphone as well as your browser. It’s a great, simple way to quickly edit a document in your Dropbox.

You can open any file in your Dropbox, provided it has a “.txt” extension.

You can also create new files and save them to whatever sub-folder you prefer. It’s a very functional tool.

Security Concern

I mentioned above that your Dropbox password is safe via this service. You should know, however, that the information you write may not be. Again, from app creator Sam Nguyen:

[TextDropApp] does transiently transmit the contents of your files through its servers, although it never saves any of your contents to disk. The transmission from your browser to the TextDrop server is unencrypted, so please only use TextDrop for non-sensitive material.

In summary, don’t use this app to make a list of your credit card numbers, because that information won’t be encrypted. Grocery lists or blog posts should be fine, though.

Conclusion

I have to say, I’ve been looking for something more or less like this for a year or so. I’m glad I found it, and will be making more use of it in the months to come.

What do you think? Do you like being able to quickly edit text documents in your Dropbox, or would you prefer something more full-featured, like Google Docs integration for Dropbox? Let us know in the comments below, along with any other useful Dropbox tools we might not know about.

The following are a list of the favorite ways I work within the Finder. A few tips are borrowed from Keir Thomas’s Mac Kung Fu: Over 300 Tips, Tricks, Hints, and Hacks for OS X Lion.

Bookmark Files In Safari

Websites and pages are not the only items that can be bookmarked in Safari or other web browsers. You can bookmark files located in your Finder. You simply select a file and drag it to your browser. It will open and be linked to where you have it located in the Finder. You can actually make a folder of linked files that you might want to open up in Safari.

When you delete or move the file from its location, the link of course will be broken.

Put Files & Folders In The Toolbar

You can drag files, folders, and applications to the toolbar of any Finder window so that it can be quickly accessed and opened. When you drag them, a little green button with a + sign in the middle will appear, which lets you know you can drop it in the toolbar.

Folders In The Sidebar

Similarly, you can also drag any folder into the sidebar of any window for quick access.

Quickly Rename Files

When you want to rename any file on the desktop or in the Finder, you can simply select it and hit the return key. The word, the existing name, such as “Untitled” will be selected, and you can start typing and rename the file.

Files In A New Folder

In Mac OS X Lion, you can now quickly put files in a new folder, anywhere in the Finder, by first selecting them, then right- or Control-click, and selecting “New Folder with Selection.”

Lock Files

If you have a file that you want to make sure never gets changed or deleted, simply lock it. To do this, select the file, and press Command+I. In the Info window click the Locked box.

Delete Folders From Time Machine

If you use Time Machine, an OS X feature that maintains incremental backups of the contents of your hard drive, you can go into Time Machine and select to have backups of a selected file or folder deleted.

Simply right- or Control-click on the file or folder when inside Time Machine, and select “Delete All Backups…”

An Instant Link To Public Dropbox

If you’re a Dropbox user, you will know that you can drop a file in the Public folder of your account, right- or Control-click on it and have Dropbox create a URL link to that file. Pretty easy, but with a little application called Bloodrop you can set it up so that when you drop a file onto the application, it will automatically add the file to your Public Dropbox folder and  create a link which will be posted to your Mac’s clipboard.

Be sure to read the instructions about where to find your Dropbox user ID in order to set up Bloodrop.

Create A New Folder

You can create a new folder anywhere in the Finder–Desktop, open Window, File Open dialog box–by typing Shift+Command+ N.

ZIP Lock Files

Got a lot of files you need to email or post for download, such as in Dropbox? The best way to do so is to select them,  right- or Control-click, and select Compress…Items.

This will create a Zip file that most computers should be able to decompress and open.

For other ideas on files and folders, start with these articles:

• How do I change the folder icon images on Mac OS X Lion?
• How to Hide Folders Using 7 Free Apps
• Using Automator to Batch Rename Files and Folder
• How To Use Automator To Batch Rename Images on Mac

Let us know what you think of these tips. Do you have any of your own to share?

I have previously explored some advantages of Dropbox’s online features. In this article, I will focus on the Dropbox for Android.

How It Works

The Dropbox app installs with a homescreen shortcut and no widget. The app interface is very basic, but provides access to more key features than you would think. The folder icons reveal the content of a folder or whether it is shared with others or the public.

Tapping the settings button (highlighted in red below) opens a menu with options to search your files, create a new folder, upload files to your Dropbox, refresh, access the help menu, or change your Dropbox settings.

Via the Dropbox settings you can enable a passcode lock for your Dropbox, report a problem, or clear your cache, among other things.

To open, download, share, or delete a file (bottom menu) or folder (top menu), press the file or folder for a few seconds until a menu with the respective options pops up as shown in the two in one screenshot below.

Saving, Sharing & Sending Files

Dropbox integrates as a sharing option with several apps. For example you can use your Android file manager to send files to your Dropbox, as demonstrated below using File Station.

After choosing Dropbox from the sharing options, you can select a folder to send it to.

Things That Do Not Work

The Android app does not allow you to download an entire folder, view or restore previous versions or deleted files, or edit sharing options, as is possible via the web interface. On the other hand, with the exception of downloading folders, none of these options are available through the desktop application either, so the Android app does not present a huge disadvantage. The main difference between the desktop and the Android app is that files are not stored locally on the device. The Android Dropbox app merely acts as a portal to the web interface.

While testing the Android app, I noticed an unusual frequency of error messages. However, when I compared features with the desktop app, I also ran into the same issue, which suggests that Dropbox was having issues in general.

Conclusion

Dropbox is a must-have app if you want to backup and sync documents between multiple devices. It’s also fantastic for sharing files and folders with friends. Be sure to combine it with the right document viewing apps on your Android. Depending on the types of files you are sharing, you will need an image viewer, a video and audio player, and a document viewer that can handle documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. Check out our 100 Best Android Apps for some suggestions.

MakeUseOf has previously covered Dropbox, including a manual by Matt:

• 5 Ways To Send Files To Your Dropbox Without Using Dropbox
• Download Files Directly To Dropbox Or Email Using sideCLOUDload
• Make Your Dropbox Portable With DropboxPortableAHK [Windows]
• Transfer Web Files Directly To Your Dropbox Folder With URL Droplet
• How To Get More Free Dropbox Storage With Your School Email Address [News]

If you are interested in cloud computing in general, you should also look at these articles:

• How Does Cloud Computing Work? [Technology Explained]
• How To Permanently Store Your Data In “The Cloud”
• 3 Ways To Escape Cloud Storage Solutions If You Don’t Trust Them

How do you currently share and sync files between your Android device and your computer?

Cyberlockers are to blame for this shift in file-sharing habits. They provide a simple browser-based upload solution, often with a premium option for faster downloads and other perks. Thanks to fast Internet, cheap storage and browser advancements these sites are now 10-a-penny.

Here are the top 10 file sharing sites on the web, in descending order according to data from Google for July 2011.

4Shared

Officially the most popular site here, 4Shared offers a decent free option for those who are reluctant to reach for a credit card. A free account provides 10GB of free storage space which can be used to upload files below 2GB. Interestingly there are also apps available for the iPhone, Android devices and BlackBerry phones as well as an outdated Symbian version too.

Premium accounts provide 100GB of space and vastly improved download speeds, and the cheapest I could find started at $6.50 a month based on a year’s subscription.

MegaUpload

Another massively popular site, MegaUpload provides two free options – non-members and members. Registering a free account is worth it in order to net 200GB of free storage and a maximum upload file size of 2GB. Free membership delivers “limited” download speeds (as opposed to “very limited” for non-members) and an average load of adverts.

Premium accounts are available for as little as 24 hours for a few bucks, or you could opt for the monthly plan which comes in at around €10 a month. As you’d expect, premium unclogs your download tubes, removes adverts and all manner of other pleasant things.

MediaFire

MediaFire’s free accounts are supported with adverts and pleasantly provide no limits to your total storage or number of files. The drawback? A maximum file size of 200MB.

The cheapest premium option costs only $9 a month and removes all those adverts plus allows for files up to 10GB in size. You also get 100GB worth of direct/hotlinking to your uploads, which you can share with anyone for instant download goodness.

FilesTube

Not a cyberlocker, but a search engine which scours other cyberlockers and returns the results in one easy to find place. Not a bad solution if you’re looking for something elusive, although the lack of an upload option makes this a bit of a one-trick-pony.

RapidShare

A free membership allows you to upload all you want, with no restrictions. That’s right – unlimited file size and unlimited storage for free! However, if a file is not downloaded within 30 days it is earmarked for deletion – so be warned.

Premium accounts start at around €10 for a month’s access and removes this 30 day limit, as well as the usual download speed restrictions.

The Pirate Bay

A public torrent tracker currently indexing over 3.5 million torrents in a variety of categories. Be sure to take care if you do use public trackers – you never know who might be watching. Check out our article for further advice!

FileServe

Another cyberlocker for all your uploading needs, FileServe provides free accounts that are good for files under 1GB. The site says that split archives are allowed too, so with some clever archiving you should be able to overcome the size limit.

Premium accounts are competetively priced and remove download/speed limits and increase the size cap to 2GB.

Hotfile

A relatively average site, only allowing for files up to 400MB to be uploaded for free. Split archives are fine, and the free option is supported with the usual advertising. A premium account will cost about $9 and for that you get 100GB of direct/hotlinking, unlimited downloading and an advert-free browsing experience.

Torrentz.eu

Torrentz is a torrent search engine which queries a lot of other trackers and returns all relevant results on one page. Clean, quick and minimalistic, Torrentz is a no-fuss search engine designed to check elsewhere so you don’t have to.

Deposit Files

Deposit Files is the least popular of all the file sharing websites on this list, yet has an incredible free option. With maximum file sizes of 2GB, unlimited storage and no deletion policy, this host is a beast. The site’s layout is clean and not littered with distracting adverts and there are a variety of ways to upload including queuing up multiple files.

Granted, as a free user your download speeds will be limited, but for around €9 a month, you can lift those limits.

Conclusion

So the cyberlockers overtook BitTorrent trackers as the most popular file sharing option out there. It’s not all pirated movies and cracked copies of Windows – these services are useful for backup, collaborating or quickly spreading your work. Of course I’d be lying if I said that piracy didn’t make up the majority of traffic, ad revenue and downloads these services receive.

What do you think of these sites? Any personal favourites? Any hidden gems? Any horror stories? Share your comments below!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Last December we profiled the then-new photo sharing tool Minus. The web app only worked for photos then. Almost a year later and Minus does so much more. With support for any file format, apps for all major platforms and a very generous amount of free online storage, Minus is the solution to the file sharing problem.

“We wanted to offer the simplest possible sharing service” the creators claim on their website. They did. Minus sports an elegant interface with no clutter and makes sharing even large files extremely easy. Simply put: this is file sharing done right.

Simply Share

Head to minus.com to get started. You can drag files to your browser to get uploaded right away, but I highly recommend you first get an account. Once you do you’ll see your dashboard, containing all the folders you’ve uploaded. Uploading another file, or collection of files, is as simple as dragging it or them from your computer’s file browser to your web browser window:

Drag and drop multiple files and Minus will take care of the rest, uploading the files for you and putting them in their own folder. You can track what is and what isn’t uploaded yet easily:

Note that you’ll need to be using a modern HTML-5 browser for this to work. You can upload any file that is under 2GB (a very generous ceiling).

Before the uploading is even done you’ll have access to various links. Whether you want to share a link to a single file or an entire folder of files, you’ll find what you’re looking for:

Copy these and send to your friends. They can then download the files. They can also browse all the media files you’ve added to a given folder, should you send them the gallery link. For example, I created a folder full of covers from the MakeUseOf Manuals project.

You can explore this gallery yourself by clicking here.

Note that galleries let people preview documents, pictures and even media files. Check out this gallery to see that in action.

Desktop & Other Clients

With such a complete web app, a desktop app hardly seems necessary. You’ll find apps though, for Windows, Mac and Linux which you can download here.

The desktop interface is very simple, allowing you to do everything you can on the web. Here is how it looks on Ubuntu:

A tray icon gives you an always-ready place to drag files to. Simply drag them to your tray and you will be uploading quickly:

Also offered are smartphone apps for iPhone and Android; a Windows Phone 7 app is in development.

Limits

So what are the limits to this service? As I said earlier, free accounts only get 10GB of storage. That is probably plenty for most people, but enthusiasts of Minus might well pay for more space. The other main limit is for individual files – 2GB is the largest upload you can do.

In terms of in-browser previews, currently only images, PDFs, text documents, music and video files are supported. Support for Microsoft Office files is coming soon.

Conclusion

Like I said: I think this is file sharing done right. It’s simple enough that anyone can use it, and isn’t cluttered with advertisements or built-in delays. I highly recommend you check it out.

Do you know of a better tool for sharing files? By all means, let us know in the comments below. Also feel free to let us know how Minus works for you, or to share some links to cool files on Minus.

Image Credit : xkcd 949

However, we’ve been gifted with a Linux-native program that offers a simplified set of features that is, in my opinion, easier to use and more visually appealing. Even more so, it usually comes with distributions that offer GNOME as the desktop environment. What is it and what exactly does it do?

About Baobab

Baobab is often masked in distributions by the name ‘Disk Usage Analyzer” rather than Baobab, but once you open the program and click on “About“, the name will suddenly appear. The name is based off the Baobab (tree), which is apparently the first kind of tree the developers thought of when making the program because of the tree’s unique way in which its bigger branches go off into smaller and smaller branches.

Overall, the program is lightweight, is easy to use, and offers some interesting visuals.

Installation (If Necessary)

Like mentioned above, if you’re running GNOME then Baobab should already be installed. You can launch it via the terminal or Alt+F2 by typing in “baobab“, or by finding “Disk Usage Analyzer” in the menus. In case it’s not installed, there are a number of ways to install it. It isn’t likely that Baobab is in its own package, but check with your distribution first.

For example, in Ubuntu, you can install gnome-utils via Synaptic, the Ubuntu Software Center, or by the command sudo apt-get install gnome-utils.

User Interface

Buttons

Once you launch the program, you’ll see how easy it is to use. At the top, you’ll see various buttons of what you can scan. This includes your home folder (recommended), the filesystem, a custom folder, or a remote location. There is also a stop button in case a scan is taking longer than you’d like and a refresh button to start a new scan for any changes.

Folder List

On the left side, you’ll see a list of all folders scanned and some information about them, such as the percentage of space the folder uses out of the entire scanned area, the actual size, and how many items are inside that specific folder. There are also arrows to the side of each folder so you can go inside those folders and see information about anything that is inside.

Colorful Graphs

On the right side, you’ll see a visual representation of the information shown on the left side. On the graph you can hover over certain sections and see more information about what it is representing. There is a Rings Chart and a Treemap Chart, and I recommend you look at both to see which one you prefer. One doesn’t give any more information than the other, but organizes the information a bit differently.

Preferences

Finally, there aren’t many things to configure at all, considering it’s supposed to be simple to use. The only things you can configure under “Preferences” are any other optional locations whenever you choose to click on the Filesystem button.

Conclusion

Baobab is indeed very simple and gets you results that you can understand quickly.  I find the graphical charts to be very helpful and keeps it from being boring to being useful. I like to use Baobab occasionally to see if there is an excess of space being used in any of the folders in my home folder, and sometimes I use it simply to see the interesting rings it generates. Either way, it’s a good tool that could tell you some things about the files you’re storing that you didn’t know before.

Do you think Baobab is useful? What other features would you like to see added in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Scanning through each sub-folder would take forever, and you could also skip over something that may be important to you. For cases like these, you need the right tool for the job. Thankfully, such a tool exists, and it packs some amazing features that will even make it fun to look through all those folders.

About Better Directory Analyzer

Better Directory Analyzer, which I will from now on call BDA, is a simple freeware program that scans through the contents of any selected folder and spits out more information about it than you thought was possible. All scanned files can be sorted in a handful of different ways, which helps you quickly find certain files that you may be looking for. So how is this helpful compared to Windows Search?

Although Windows XP‘s version of Windows Search actually packed more of a punch, Windows 7‘s version only lets you search by filename, file size, and date modified (without using hidden operators). Windows 7 users can find benefit the most by using BDA as there are many different parameters to search and select files.

Installation and Launch

To install, you’ll need to head over to this page and click on the download link. At the time of this article, there is only a version 1.0, which is fine. Once downloaded, double click on the file to start the installer. Go through all the steps, and you’re done. You should now have a nice shortcut for BDA on your desktop. When you first start, you’ll land in the Files tab. Here is where you can choose the folder you wish to scan for its contents.

Either drag and drop a folder into the empty box in the middle, or click on the “Select folder” button on the bottom and then choose the desired folder. It will then take a couple seconds (more if the folder is large) to scan for its contents, and when it completes you should see all the found files listed in the box in the middle.

Features

Great, you scanned for the files, but now what? Here is where the fun really begins. In the Files tab, you can also choose the minimum and maximum sizes for the files you would like to find, as well as a range for the date modified. If you move over to the File Types tab, you’ll find a list of all the different file types found in your selected folder.

A great feature of BDA is that it can visualize many of its results in pie charts, so you can adjust the number of specific file types that should be shown, choose whether it should count the number of files or the amount of space that each file type takes up, and then hit Visualize.

Under the Duplicate Files tab, you can easily spot duplicate files and delete extras where they are not needed. This tab is amazing if you know there are some duplicates and want to regain some wasted hard drive space. Here’s a simple tip: if you know that there are some files that are duplicated in two different folders, you can create a new folder and drag the other two into the new one. Then you can scan the new umbrella folder to include the files of the two other folders.

The Hidden Files tab is virtually the same as the tab for Duplicate Files, except that it shows hidden files. You can also select these and delete them as you wish. Finally, there is a Largest Files tab, where you can choose to view any number of the top files in terms of size. This helps find some clunkers that could be moved or deleted as needed. This tab also has a Visualize button.

The last tab in the program (besides Help) is the HTML Report tab. With this tab you can create a report (in HTML, I assume) that contains any of the selected bits of information over the scanned content of the selected folder. Use this tab if you need to transmit your results for whatever reason.

Conclusion

Better Directory Analyzer is a fantastic tool that I recently found and will be using extensively for a while to clean out some backup folders that I have sitting on my hard drive. In terms of tools that are aimed to be used for maintenance and similar tasks, this is one of the better programs that is actually a joy to use. There aren’t any complicated settings that need to be configured, so the experience is simply “install and go”. I definitely recommend this to anyone who could benefit from using it.

What techniques do you use to tame your files? What is your favorite feature about this program? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

A free, cross-platform tool, dupeGuru does only one thing – find duplicate files on your computer. As it turns out, it does this one thing very well. Capable of quickly scanning large volumes of files very quickly, dupeGuru scanned half a terabyte of files in a few minutes for me. If you’re running out of hard drive space CCleaner and CCEnhancer can help you free up space in Windows, and BleachBit cleans up Linux systems. If programs like that leave your drive too full however, finding and deleting duplicate files is a good idea.

Find & Remove Duplicates

Getting started with dupeGuru is simple – you need to add folders to scan.

Which folders you add is up to you – you can add just your Documents or the entirety of your hard drive. Be aware though that if it scans your system drive, it may alert you to duplicate files the system needs in order to run. Don’t delete anything you don’t understand.

The scan might take a while, but not too long – I scanned 500GB worth of data in just a few minutes. Once the scan is done you’ll have your results:

As you can see the system points out which files are duplicated and where. By default files are considered duplicates if their contents seem largely the same. As pictured you can see how alike files are by percentage. You can right-click copies to check them out or even delete them.

Would you prefer to find files with the exact same filename? This is possible too:

In the settings you change what a duplicate is. You can scan by the contents of the file, or just look for files with similar names.

Special Versions

Scanning by content or by file name might not give you the results you’re looking for. Music files, for example, can be encoded in different ways. An mp3 file may hold the same song as an mp4 file, for example, but look very different to the default version of dupeGuru.

Don’t panic! There is a special version of dupeGuru just for music files – dupeGuru ME. This version scans the metadata of your music files to find out when you have two copies of the same song.

This helped me find duplicate files I didn’t know about, and can probably help you too.

Are you a photographer? There is another similar tool for pictures. Find redundant copies of photos which are wasting space.

Download & Donate

Like what you see? Head over to the dupeGuru homepage to download dupeGuru. The music and the picture versions can be found there too.

If you use the program, and like it, you should seriously consider donating to the developer. He puts a lot of volunteer time into projects like this, and likes to eat food.

Conclusion

This isn’t the first time we’ve taught you how to find duplicate files. We’ve taught you 5 ways to find duplicate image files in Windows and showed you Auslogics’ duplicate file finder. I like dupeGuru however, because it works on Linux, Mac and Windows computers and is easy to use.

Do you like another tool better? Do you have any questions about dupeGuru? Let us know in the comments below.