1-4a Rename is the feature king of the batch renamer tools.

Many batch renamer tools exist. Michael recently reviewed ReNamer which offers enough features for most users. However, the feature king of the batch renamer tools certainly is 1-4a Rename. If you visit the tool’s homepage, you will see that this tool is quite old and hasn’t been developed further in recent years. Nonetheless, it runs perfectly under every newer OS including the 64-bit versions.

What does this batch renamer offer you that others do not? When you launch the tool for the first time, nothing spectacular awaits you:

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ReNamer is a free portable Windows tool that allows you to rename multiple files at once. It is easy to use because it offers specialized rules for every possible file renaming scenario (see options with screenshots below).

You can simply drag and drop files and folders to the ReNamer interface. This allows you to rename multiple files at different locations in one go. You can also apply multiple file renaming rules at once.

Probably the most important feature of ReNamer is that you can preview the results before actually renaming multiple files. I recommend the use of this function always because reversing the renaming of multiple files is often quite difficult.

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Are you looking for a freeware tool to synchronize folders? SyncBack is free and a great application to synchronize folders. Besides that it can also create backups of your data. But you are reading this because you want to synchronize folders, right? So go ahead and download SyncBack here and you’ll have a working folder synchronization tool within a minute.

When you start the application for the first time you are asked if you want to create a profile. Without a profile you can’t do anything, so you should create one. In the next dialog window you have to choose between a backup and a synchronization profile. No matter how you decide, you will have to make additional specifications. This time the options are manifold:

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Sometimes it gets very frustrating to use Windows Explorer for such simple tasks as copying files, especially when the amount to copy is large. First, it always seems to take more time than it should. More speed is always needed. Second, if any error occurs during the process, the whole operation is aborted or at least stopped. Third, if the data is copied, there is no way to verify whether the copy is valid. Fourth, if you have to abort a copy job, there is no way to resume it.

If any of the above points bugs you, you should check out TeraCopy. It solves all four issues.

Depending on your OS, file transfers between hard disks are up to 40% faster when using TeraCopy. The speed increase is only significant on locally attached disks, though. Copies to a network share are not speedier at all because network bandwidth is a limiting factor on modern hardware.

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Unlocker is a free tool that allows you to unlock a file that you can’t delete, rename, or move because it is opened in another program. The unlock tool adds a menu point to Windows Explorer, which makes it quite convenient for getting rid of persistent files.

When I tested Unlocker with an opened Word file, the tool had no problem unlocking the file. However, Windows 7 Explorer still complained that the file was opened in another program. Nevertheless, Unlocker’s delete function was able to remove the file. Note that files that you delete with Unlocker will not be moved to the Windows Recycle Bin.

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7-zip is probably the most popular free unzip software even though IZArc might be a better zip utilty. I think on every bootable Windows PE flash drive belongs an unzip software. If you have to download tools to solve your troubleshooting problem, then you will often need an unzip software to extract the utility from the downloaded archive. This is the only feature an unzip software for a rescue stick really needs. This is why I have tried 7-Zip Portable on Windows PE 3.0.

7-Zip doesn’t offer a portable version, but PortableApps.com provides a version of 7-Zip that works without installation. Actually, you have to install 7-Zip Portable once on your USB flash drive. But then you can launch the unzip software from Windows systems where 7-Zip hasn’t been installed.

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Drive Monitor is a new free SMART hard drive monitor from Acronis. Drive Monitor can predict hard drive failures before they occur, report critical hard disk events, and monitor the state of Acronis backup tools.

The free hard drive monitor allows you to monitor temperature (only in Fahrenheit), seek error rate, spin-up time, and more than 20 other indicators. If the disk doesn’t support SMART, you can configure for each hard disk separately a script that queries the drive. Of course, this only works if your hard drive manufacturer has provided the corresponding query tools.

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OK, time for a personal confession. This review was commissioned some time ago (read, 2009), but in his infinite wisdom your intrepid author thought “What better way to test such a product than as part of a real-life Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 deployment?”. StarWind was quickly installed and configured, but then the deployment took off at such a frantic pace that all other considerations (such as writing the review) were abandoned in a desperate attempt to keep on top of things.

And during the deployment, StarWind didn’t get looked at once. Why? Because it worked perfectly. As advertised. No crashes, no funny behaviour, no performance bottlenecks, no regular patching needed, nothing. In our industry, it’s generally the problematic or the most complex products which tend to demand the most attention – having access to a solution which works quietly and efficiently in the background is a rare treat. So even though I was meant to write this a while back, at least I can now do the write-up with several months of production experience backing it up. Don’t you feel privileged? Good.

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Competition Alert! StarWind Software is raffling a license of their iSCSI SAN product. The winner will receive a license for StarWind Enterprise worth USD$995. More information can be found at the end of the article.

Like many technologies in the IT industry, storage is one of those areas of cost in which you can guarantee that your needs will never decrease. We all read stories about the latest advances in speed, reliability and capacity, while marvelling at the ever-decreasing per-GB price. We squeeze the finance department for some extra money, insisting that this next storage purchase will meet the organisation’s needs for at least five years. Two years later, we’re back asking for more money.

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Bart’s Stuff Test 5 (Bst5) is a free portable hard drive stress test tool. You can use a hard drive stress test tool whenever you become worried that a hard drive is not working properly. The tool allows you to select drives or individual folders. You can also test network drives, but this also means that you will “stress-test” your network.

Bst5 uses the free space on the disk, and if you don’t stop it, it will use almost all available disk space. So better be careful if you run a “hard drive stress test” on a virtual disk that grows dynamically. However, you can configure how much free space Bst5 will leave. If you are afraid that the disk space that contains data is corrupt, Bst5 won’t be of much help.

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It appears to me that hard disks are more reliable than in former times. However, hard drives still crash. The best way to rescue the data from a damaged disk is to create a raw image on a second disk. The longer you mess with a damaged disk drive, the more likely it becomes that you lose even more data. Once you have a raw image of your data, you can check out what is valuable.

Raw Copy is a portable Windows tool that copies data directly at the individual byte level instead of through the file system. This means less stress for the damaged disk and ensures that no more data will be destroyed while you try to rescue what is still readable. If important parts of the file system have been damaged, it can be the only way to access a disk.

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Submitted by Santhosh B – Blog: JiJi Technologies JiJi Self Extractor merges multiple files into a single self-extracting file. Compressed files can be converted as a self extracting file, which would be automatically decompressed on self extraction. It supports 15 different compression formats such as tar, 7z, zip, iso, arj, lzma, cab, z, rar, bz2, gz, jar, nsis, cpio, chm, bzip2 for auto decompression. This facility would be convenient for data transfers across internet, e-mails. This is also suitable for packaging software for deployment on client machines.

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Virtual CloneDrive lives up to its name. This free tool allows you to mount ISO, IMG, CCD, DVD, UDF, and BIN files. The main difference from comparable tools is that the mounted drive is indistinguishable from a physical drive. You can test this by mounting an ISO image from a video DVD. If you right-click the drive letter, you will notice that Windows thinks that it deals with a real DVD drive because the context menu contains a “play” entry. All other freeware ISO mounting tools I’ve tried so far didn’t have this capability. This can be useful with applications that require a real DVD drive to work properly (for example, reference books).

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We all know that backing up our data is essential. Data backup usually it isn’t something we have to worry about; centralized backup is found even in small companies, and if the backup policy doesn’t protect all of our files we do manual backups. So in theory there shouldn’t be a market for applications that recover deleted files. But we also know that backups can be out of date or the backup process could have failed completely.

Many applications exist that try to recover deleted files in these situations. Most professional recovery software is pretty pricey, though—it’s almost as if their producers want to make some extra bucks from your misery. If you ever find yourself in the unpleasant situation where you lost some files and don’t have an up-to-date backup, you might not care much about the price to get these files back. However, powerful recovery tools are available for free. One of them is NTFS Undelete. As the name implies it can recover deleted files from NTFS formatted drives.

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Submitted by Dennis Smith – Blog: Gourami Farm Commander looks a lot like Norton Commander and ‘Total Commander, but the functionality is very different. With Total Commander both the left and right panel are file systems. With Farm Commander the left panel displays file system, where you can select files and directories. In the right panel are the Windows 2000/XP/Citrix/Terminal/Domain workstations/servers listed. First you have to select the files in the left panel, and then the servers in the right panel. Next you have to choose an action, such as copy, move or delete. Farm Commander then copies/deletes/moves the selected files to or from the selected server. In particular in Citrix/Terminal Server environments you often have to copy files at once. Farm Commander also features detailed reports. As administrator you should know whether some of the actions failed.

Farm Commander

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