DragonDisk is a free Amazon S3 file management client for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The program can be used to backup, share and organize files in an interface that looks similar to that of many ftp clients.

The first thing that you need to do after installing the software is to add at least one S3 account to the account list. Click on File > Accounts to open the account management window. A click on New opens another window where you need to enter account related information. This includes the account name, access key, secret key, if SSL is enabled and several other options under the advanced tab.

Once you have configured the account you can log in using the Root pulldown menu on the left or right side of the software. The account name should be listed there along with all local storage devices.

You can load a second Amazon S3 account or display the contents of a local hard drive in the second part of the interface.

All files and folders are displayed by default. You can use filters to limit names or extensions in the file listing.

Once connected, you can copy files to or from the Amazon S3 storage, edit files, change permissions or metadata.

Another interesting option is the ability to create sync jobs that can be run regularly. You could use it to make a local backup copy of your Amazon storage or specific files stored there.

DragonDisk supports versioning, external buckets, reduced redundancy storage as well as various compression and encryption algorithms.

Interested users can download the free application from the official program website.

The changes address issues that Microsoft has identified after analyzing usage statistics of hundreds of millions of Windows users. Findings include that 20% of all copy jobs take longer than 2 minutes to complete, and that 5.61% of all copy jobs fail.

Microsoft based on statistics and usability studies decided to improve the copy experience in the following ways:

• Consolidate the copy experience to improve managing and monitoring capabilities.
• Remove distractions and concentrate on the information that users need.
• Give Windows users more control over the copy operations.

Copy jobs now run in one window, instead of multiple ones. If you currently start multiple copy jobs in Windows, you will notice that each displays the copy process and information in its own copying window. In Windows 8, users will see all of their jobs in one window.

Experienced users may have already noticed the pause icon next to each copy job in the above screenshot. It is now possible to pause specific jobs, for instance to speed up an important copy job.

A click on More Details is now revealing detailed information about each copy job, including realtime throughput data of each job.

Microsoft is also addressing the conflict window that is for instance displayed when a file already exists in the destination folder. The current conflict resolution dialog is confusing and not clear at all.

The new conflict resolution dialog displays less information on the screen, but enough to allow the user to make a decision right on the screen.

While I’m not entirely sure how the dialog will look like if there are dozens or even hundreds of conflicts, I can see its use for a small number of conflicts.

You can read up on all the improvements at the Building Windows 8 blog. (via Windows 8)

Virtual Files uses a similar, albeit slightly different, technique. The program creates a virtual drive on the operating system after installation. This drive is accessible and manageable via Windows Explorer just like any other drive on the system.

The core difference to existing drives and folders is that it only stores virtual copies, or file references if you prefer, of files and folders. The idea here is to give Windows users an option to add virtual copies from as many folders and storage locations as they want to optimize and speed up the workflow and improve accessibility.

Users could create a photo folder and fill it with virtual copies of all their photos, regardless of their storage location on the operating system. The very same option exists for other data types as well, documents, movies or web development files.

Folders can only created directly on the virtual drive. It is suggested to create folders for separate data sets. It is then possible to drag and drop files to the virtual drive to create virtual copies of them. Users need to use a right-click drag and drop to move the files to select Create shortcuts here to create the virtual copies.

A left-click drag and drop is blocked by the application due to lack of physical storage space.

The configuration itself is not overly comfortable, especially if files are stored in many different folders on the system as it is not possible to create virtual copies of folders via drag and drop.

A frontend to make the initial configuration easier would really improve the application, for instance by allowing the user to select multiple folders and files on a system and their target virtual folder on the virtual drive.

Regardless of that; Virtual Files is an interesting application, especially for Windows users who like to access files from multiple storage devices and locations under one root folder, and users of previous Windows operating system that do not have the libraries feature.

Windows users can download the file management software Virtual Files from the developer website. The software is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Let’s take a look at installing, using, and creating a Nautilus action for Gloobus Preview.

Installation

I am going to illustrate the installation of Gloobus Preview on Ubuntu (10.04 to be exact). Since the PPA has been updated, installing on Ubuntu is quite simple. Just follow these steps:

Open up a terminal window.

Issue the command sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gloobus-dev/gloobus-preview.

Now issue the command sudo apt-get update.

Finally issue the command sudo apt-get install gloobus-preview.

Once the software is installed you can close the terminal window.

Usage

Figure 1

Using Gloobus Preview is a bit tricky – which is why I want to show you how to add a Nautilus Action for this command. You can see just how Gloobus Preview will work by issuing the gloobus-preview command from within a directory that contains a file you want to preview. Say you want to preview the file image.jpg. To open this in Gloobus Preview you would issue the command gloobus-preview image.jpg. When you do this Gloobus Preview will open with the image inside (see Figure 1).

As you can see there are two arrow buttons and a square icon. The up arrow changes Gloobus Preview to full screen, the down arrow switches back to normal view, and the square opens the file in the standard, default file type viewer (such as Eye Of GNOME for images).

Nautilus Action

Now, let’s create a Nautilus Action so you can simply right click a file within Nautilus and open that file in Gloobus Preview. To do this open up the Nautilus Actions Configuration tool (click System > Preferences > Nautilus Actions Configuration. From within this tool set up the following configurations:

Under the Action tab:

Check Display item in selection context menu.

Check Display item in location context menu.

Context label: Gloobus Preview.

Check Display item in the toolbar.

Leave all else default.

Under the Command tab:

Change the command path to /usr/bin/gloobus-preview.

Change the Parameters to %M

That’s it. Now click the Save button and you’re almost ready to test it out. Before you test it, however, you need to restart Nautilus. To do this click ALT-F2 and, in the run dialog, enter nautilus -q. Now open up Nautilus to a directory containing any of the following file types:

Images: jpeg, png, icns, bmp, svg, gif, psd, xcf
Documents: pdf, cbr, cbz, doc, xls, odf, ods, odp, ppt
Source: c++, c#, java, javascript, php, xml, log, sh, python
Audio: mp3, ogg, midi, 3gp, wav
Video: mpg, avi, ogg, 3gp, mkv, flv
Other: folders, ttf, srt, plain-text

If you right-click any of those files you will see a Gloobus Preview entry in the context menu. Select Gloobus Preview and the file will open up in your newly created Gloobus Preview Action.

What we now have is an incredibly fast, easy to use, light weight file manager that will please just about any level of user. And best of all, it can be added to nearly any distribution. So if you are unhappy with your desktop’s bulky file manager, I’ll show you how to install and use PCMan File Manager to lighten up your desktops’ load.

Features

For a light weight file manager, PCMan File Manager has a nice list of features:

• Very fast and lightweight
• Near one-second start up time
• Tabbed browsing
• Volume management (mount/umount/eject)
• File searching utility (GUI frontend for find + grep commands)
• Drag & Drop
• Files can be dragged across tabs
• Fast loading of large directories
• File association support (Default application)
• Thumbnails
• Bookmarks
• Non-UTF-8 encoded filename support
• Icon, compact, and detailed list views
• Standards compliant
• Clean and user-friendly interface

Installation

Installation is simple if you follow these steps:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool.
2. Search for “pcmanfm” (no quotes).
3. Mark pcmanfm for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

Or, if you’d rather install from the command line:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Issue the command sudo apt-get install pcmanfm (in Ubuntu) or yum install pcmanfm (in Fedora). NOTE: If using Fedora you will have to su to the root user before you issue the command to install.
3. When finished, close your terminal window.

That’s it. PCMan File Manager should now be installed. Let’s see what it looks like and how it’s used.

Usage

Figure 1

To start up PCMan File Manager click Applications > System Tools > PCMan File Manager. When you do you will see a fairly standard looking file manager pop up in next to no time.

The GUI is about as straight-forward as you can get. In fact, the GUI almost resembles that of Nautilus from the GNOME desktop.

If you’re not fond of the Location view in the left navigation pane, you can switch that to Tree view by clicking the folder icon in the lower left corner.

Once very nice feature of PCMan File Manager is that you can very quickly open up your terminal of choice by either clicking F4 (when PCMan File Manager is open and has focus) or by clicking Tool > File Manager. Of course, before this will work you have to configure the file manager you want to use. To do this click Edit > Preferences and then click on the Advanced tab. From this tab click on the Terminal drop-down menu to select which terminal program you want to use.

Outside of that, PCMan File Manager works just as any file manager would. You can drag and drop between different file managers if you like and, as stated above, drag and drop files between tabs (to create a new tab click CTRL-TAB).

Final thoughts

If you’re looking for an incredibly fast, easy to use file manager you shouldn’t have to look any further than PCMan File Manager. It doesn’t have all of the features it’s older siblings have, but it works incredibly fast and will fit well on your light and snappy window manager.

The GNOME Activity Journal is not a file browser, but a logger of activity. It uses the Zeitgeist engine to keep track of the files/websites/contacts/etc you have interacted with and tracker to get the current state of files. It’s very handy to use if you are constantly struggling to remember exactly what you did and what day you did it. In this article I will show you how to install and use this handy tool.

A preface

Before we start on this little journey, I must say there is a bug or two in the current iteration of GAJ. The developers are currently working on a new migration script from the old ontology to the new. What this is causing is the inability of GAJ to track web sites. This does not affect GAJs ability to track the files you have used, so the tool is still very usable. Look for future updates to resolve the issue of not being able to track your interaction with the web.

Another issue is that the package from the Fedora 13 repositories is broken. So if you are using Fedora 13, and you expect GAJ to work, you will be disappointed. This issue will hopefully be resolved very soon.

With that said, on with the show.

Installation

Installation is very simple. Just follow these steps:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool.
2. Search for “gnome activity journal” (no quotes).
3. Mark Gnome Activity Journal for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it. The above steps will also install the necessary dependencies. Once installed, in order to start up the GAJ, click Applications > Accessories > Activity Journal and the main (and only) window will start.

Using the GNOME Activity Journal

Figure 1

When you fire up GAJ what you see will, obviously, depend upon how much activity you have had. If you take a look at Figure 1 you can see the user I use for writing purposes hasn’t had much activity over the last few days. Figure 1 deceivingly show an HTML page that has been accessed. That page was actually a page that had been saved to the hard drive.

As you open and interact with files you will see the “Today” column update almost immediately. If you are curious about a particular file you can hover your mouse over that file to get a thumbnail preview. If you want to re-open that file you can click on it and the file will open in the chosen, default application for that file type.

What I really like about this tool is that it, as the name would imply, serves as a journal of what files I have accessed during the calendar year. You can scroll backwards and forwards (using the left or right-pointing arrows) to any date you want.

Final thoughts

If you are looking for a tool that will keep track of your daily activity on your machine GAJ might be the right tool. Even though it has a few bugs in it’s current form, it is still very useful.

TaggedFrog uses a different approach. The portable software uses tags – a concept known by most users from bookmarking websites, blogs and other Internet related activities – to index and manage files in Windows.

There are two ways to index files with TaggedFrog. The first option is to drag and drop files or folders into the interface. This will open a window with the option to add tags for these files. The same principles applies to shell context menu entries and the add file option in the program itself. The second option is to configure the auto-tagging option. This will automatically monitor folders and tag new files according to the user’s configuration.

TaggedFrog can tag any files that are added by the user. It displays them in a tag cloud and provides search and filter options to quickly find the desired files. Two add-ons are available which will add audio previews and meta information import to the software program. The computer memory usage is a bit high when the software is active (can go up to 70 Megabytes+). TaggedFrog (via Techie Buzz) is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2003. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 and can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

These software programs can be very helpful for users who have lots of files on removable drives and optical disks. PixDiskat is a file management and cataloging software for the Windows operating system. The program is basically a directory indexer with a few aces up its sleeve.

The cataloging software can maintain multiple different catalogs and volumes that reside in each catalog. Each volume refers to exactly one directory that has been scanned by the application. It is unfortunately not possible to combine multiple directories (with the exception of subdirectories that can be included) in one volume.

PixDiskat will scan a selected directory and adds information about its files and folders to the selected volume. Several options are available to customize the scan. Various information about files are automatically imported by default including image thumbnails, application file versions, html file contents, archive contents or media file descriptions. Several lines of text are also automatically imported and available in the selection window.

The disk cataloging software offers a search interface to search in a catalog or volumes with several options provided to customize the search further.

Volumes can be exported into various formats including csv html or text. Export options can be customized to include or exclude information.

PixDiskat is a fast cataloging software for the Windows operating system. It is not as flexible as it could be but shines when it comes to indexing data CDs,DVDs and removable drives.

The application will display a configuration window after installation which is displaying the shell entries that have been added by the application. This includes copying the path, opening the command prompt, running files with parameters or opening notepad or paint.

Not all of the entries are needed though. It is possible to remove some entries from the context menu entry. New entries – called commands in the application – can be added as well. Every entry consists of a title, program name, arguments, directories and other variables that can be defined during creation. Entries can be moved around to change their position in the context menu.

It is for instance possible to add any executable file to the right-click context menu including specific launch parameters. Another interesting feature of Open++ is the ability to use short path and prompts for arguments when pressing keys on the keyboard at the same time.

The application is running as a rundll.exe process with about 3 Megabytes of computer memory usage after installation.

One of the reasons you should take a moment to get to know this tool is that it is quite different from Explorer. Although fundamentally you tackle the same tasks with both tools there are enough differences to confuse the new user. To this end, let’s examine the ins and outs of the Nautilus file manager.

Layout

Nautilus Main Window

Unlike Explorer (and many other File Managers), Nautilus is a single-pane file manager. You can not change the view to split-pane mode or dual-pane mode. You get what you get…a single window showing you files and directories.

As you can see (in the image to the right) the Nautilus interface is very clean and simple. But your first thought might be, “How do I drag and drop a file into another directory?” We’ll get to that in a moment.

Each time you double click on a directory a new window will open to that directory. You will then have two windows open. This makes dragging and dropping simple. Careful though, the default drag and drop action is not to copy but to move. So if you plan on copying a file from one window to the next you will have to right click the file (or directory) and select “Copy”. To paste the file (or directory) you will go to the target directory and either click Edit and then click Paste or right click within the directory and select “Paste”.

Nautilus List View

You can also switch from Icon or List view. In the image above you can see Nautilus in Icon mode. The image to the left shows Nautilus in List View mode. As you can see each directory can be expanded to reveal its contents.

But what about navigating directories? Normally, in Linux, you would scroll to the top of a directory and see an entry that was either “..” or “./” and you knew you could click (or double click) on this to navigate up one directory. In Nautilus you won’t see this. Instead you will notice, in the bottom left corner, an dropdown that shows your current working directory. If you click that dropdown it will reveal all directories above the current working directory.The Image below and to the right shows this dropdown in action.

Directory Dropdown

As you can see the gHacks directory is found in the /home/jlwallen/Pictures directory. You can open a new Nautilus window in any one of these directories by selecting the target from the dropdown.

Another way of quick navigation is the Places menu. If you click on that menu you will see a number of various directories. You can also add bookmarks to this menu by selecting the Add Bookmark entry from within the current working directory.

The Bookmarks Menu

The nice thing about adding bookmarks is that they are then added to the Bookmark submenu in the Places menu on the GNOME Panel.

You can also edit your bookmarks by selecting Edit Bookmarks from within the “Places” Nautilus menu.

Configurations

And of course there are plenty of configurations to undertake with Nautilus.

If you click the Edit menu you will see the Preferences entry. Click that to open the Preferences window where you will see six tabs: View, Behavior, Display, List Columns, Preview, and Media. One of the more important tabs is the Media tab. This is where you configure which applications will open different types of files.

Final Thoughts

The Nautilus file manager is an outstanding tool to manage your files and directories. Once you get used to the differences between this tool and your previous file manager, you will come to find Nautilus to be one outstanding utility.

The file management software Belvedere is a portable software program. The source code is provided as well on the program’s homepage. But what exactly are the features of the file management software?

Belvedere in its current stage can be used to define file management rules on certain folders of the system. The software program is capable of moving, copying, renaming, deleting or opening files that match conditions specified by the user.

Conditions for the name, file extension, size or dates can be configured. It would for instance be no problem to create a rule to move all files with the file extension xyz to another folder. Conditions can be combined so that Belvedere will automatically start the process when any or all of the conditions are met.

Belvedere is running in the background and checking automatically if any files meet the conditions set by the user. If that is the case it will automatically start the action defined by the user. A few things are problematic for now which hopefully will be changed in newer versions. It is for instance not possible to copy or move a file into a new folder if a file of the same name already exists in that folder.

Users working with extensions should also make sure to only add the extension and not the dot. Belvedere comes with a test button that can test the rules before they are added which is a good indicator if the rules have been properly configured.

You can download version .3 of the file management software over at Lifehacker.

I’m not a huge fan of file managers because I can’t see a reason to use them these days but I know that some, including Tobey, use them daily. So, what can you do with Frigate3 ? The main purpose is to manage files effectively of course which includes queuing file operations, build in zip support, file viewers, ftp, ftps and sftp support, network support, size manager, advanced search, mp3 tagger and build in syntax highligher.

Frigate3 has a lot of features which is the major difference to my setup. I tend to use different applications for my needs and the advantage of Frigate3, and any other file manager, is that you only need to install one software to increase the functionality of your Windows operating system.

I suppose Tobey will leave a comment about the File Manager when he reads the article and it’s probably better that he does, because he knows the program way better. I guess it’s worth a look if you are looking for a file manager or use file managers.

Using MD5 checker, we can ensure the integrity of the files. All you need is to copy those published MD5 hashes to clipboard and launch this application. Paste it, and then simply click the browse button to locate the file. The md5 hashes will be compared to the one on the clipboard. The result then will be shown if the file was altered or not.

You could also create hashes for your file.