Free Version Tracking with File Hamster

Version tracking is extremely useful if you work with files that change very often. This is mostly interesting for coders and website owners but also for users who write large text files and artists that work with graphics or music for instance. In short; File Hamster keeps backups of all old versions of files that you specify making it incredibly easy to revert back to a previous version or take a look at the changes between different versions.

The first thing that you have to do after installation is add at least one folder that should be monitored to File Hamster. You may choose all or selected files that should be monitored. It adds subfolders automatically to your selection as well. The selected files will now be monitored and a backup will be created before a write process changes the file. File Hamster prompts for action whenever a file is edited, you may add comments to it to describe the changes for instance.

It is of course possible to access older versions at anytime in case you want to revert back to them.

To make this free version tracking software even better you can customize it further. You might want to limit the number of revisions that should be kept. This can be done by either adding a maximum or by defining the amount of time that old revisions should be kept. Both are set to unlimited by default.

File Hamster supports plugins of which at least two are extremely useful. The first is a zip plugin which compresses the backups saving valuable disk space if you work with large uncompressed files.

The second is a Diff plugin which works very well with programs that display the differences between files. Winmerge would be a free tool that could be used for this purpose.

I found this program at the great freeware genius blog.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday March 20, 2007 -
Tags:archive, archiving, backup, coding, file-hamster, freeware, revisions, version-tracking, Windows