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).
- Note that the file name of the file being monitored has to remain unchanged for File Hamster to keep taking snapshots of it. If you want to use different version names for your file then simply tell File Hamster to monitor the folder that you keep it in and it start monitoring each successive file name that it finds in that folder.
- If you are worried about backups taking up too much disk space, you can do a number of things: you can set the maximum number of revisions File Hamster will keep of any single file, set a time period beyond-which a kept revision will be discarded, or require a user defined delay period between revisions. You could also have File Hamster do compressed backups (see below).
- Plugins: there are a handful of available plugins that you can use with File Hamster. A really useful plugin is the zip plugin, which enables File Hamster to compress into zip archives when performing file backups.
This is a powerful program that works really well; so well, in fact, that you may forget that any incremental backups are taking place at all. And it is 100% free. Download and install it right now; the time will most certainly come when you will need it to save your skin (and yes it will deliver).
Version tested: 1.3.015
Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP, Vista; requires .NET Framework 2.0
Go to the download page to get the latest version (approx 1.4 megs). Also visit the program home page.
