3 Great Computer Utilities for Data Management

Over the years, I have tried many different computer utilities, all claiming that they are the best at "such and such," and all telling you how they will make your life easier. With over 20 years experience looking for a good computer utilities to use in managing my computers I have found three that I wish to share with others because I think that they offer enough value to gain some recognition for the help that they do provide. I also only recommend products and utilities that I am willing to use myself. I have found the following tools to be very valuable in saving time and reducing gray hair, the utilities are, Synchromat, Folder sizes and Diskeeper. I hope that you find them as valuable as I do everyday.

Synchromat does more than just synch up your files. This utility has many built in extras and will help you keep only the most up-to-date files needed. By the name, one can guess that this tool will synchronize files and folders, but the options are what give this tool my vote of approval. I can choose which way I synchronize my files, I can copy to multiple folders, or even make sure that multiple locations are all synched up at once. I can filter files that I do not want touched; I can do this against my local hard drives or across the network. I can setup this software to run automatically per a schedule. The possibilities are endless. So when you have a back copy of your data off on that other hard drive and you need to know which folder has the most current data, use this utility, not only can you find out quickly which has the more current data, you can synch the 2 locations up very quickly.

Folder Sizes is another great utility that I find immensely useful and full of features. How often have you looked at your hard drive and said to yourself, "where did all the free space go? I don't have that much installed, do I?" Well this utility will help you find the items that are taking the most room on your hard drive and then it will display the results in a number of different ways. The view that I prefer is the folder/file by size. This view will show you the largest files and folders on top of the bar graph report with smaller folders as you go down the page. This has helped me to find things like strange temp folders that were storing junk that I did not need and that I could delete, thus allowing me to find more hard drive room. I also find this utility especially useful on business servers to show users how much space they are taking on the server, thus allowing them the opportunity to reduce their data footprint on the server.

This utility also will group the files by function. This can be especially handy when you want to know how much space your OS (Operating System) is taking up on your hard drive. Whether you are using the folder / file size graph or any one of the other visual aids to see where your hard drive space is going I think that you will be amazed to learn just what is going on within your hard drive. This utility also supports finding oldest, duplicated, and temporary files, the ability to send reports straight to a web site, a scheduler for automation, and much more.

Finally, Diskeeper will help to keep your hard drive defragmented automatically in the background. Built to interface with the new larger drives this utility can defrag the large terabyte drive with ease. When using this product on a Home Server or an Office Server you have a real time dashboard consol that will display your fragmentation levels at any given time. This beats the utility built into the Windows OS any day. One of the problems that I have with the defragmentation utility built into Windows is that if you have less than 15% free space on your hard drive, the utility does not want to run and if you get below 10% it will tell you that you do not have enough space to even try to run. Not so with this utility, this software will allow you to have less than 1% free and will still defrag your drive for you.