Keeping the hard disk in your desktop computer in a good shape is not a simple task. Managing and organizing files on an external NAS server or an enterprise storage system is much more difficult. Pictures, movies, songs, documents, reports and application specific files are flooding into our computers and storage devices making in very complex to keep things organized. The problem becomes even more complicated due to the fact that everyone has his/her own specific needs and it is just impossible to develop a file organizing solution that will be good for everyone. The FlexTk file management toolkit includes built-in file classification, categorization and organizing capabilities allowing one to define user-specific file organizing rules, policies and actions especially tuned for the user's specific needs.

The user is provided with the ability to define one or more file organizing policies and apply them simultaneously during a single pass through one or more disks, directories or network shares. Each file organizing policy consists of a list of file matching rules and an action that should be executed for all files matching the specified rules. FlexTk provides numerous types of file organizing actions including copy, move, move and link, delete or execute a custom command.

Now let's define an example file organizing operation consisting of four independent organizing commands, which will cleanup temporary files, backup newly modified documents, archive unused music files to an external disk and archive old pictures to a RAR archive. All four commands will be executed simultaneously during a single pass through one or more disks or directories as you will see in this tutorial. In order to simplify the file organizing process, file organizing operations should be added as user-defined-commands. Select the 'User-Defined Commands' tool pane, press the right mouse button and select the 'Add New - Organize Command' menu item to add a new file organizing user-defined command.

On the 'Command Inputs' dialog add all files and directories that should be processed and press the 'Next' button. Each file organizing operation may contain one or more organizing commands performing specific operations on various types of files. In order to add a new organizing command, press the 'Add' button and specify a unique command name. During the file organizing process, all organizing commands will be evaluated one after one in the same order as specified in the commands list. All the specified file matching rules will be evaluated until a first match, after which all the remaining file matching rules will be skipped. No more than one file organizing action will be executed for each file.

The first file organizing command is very simple. Add the file category matching rule, set it to the 'Temporary Files' file class group and select the delete action type. All files that will be categorized as temporary files during the organizing process will be deleted.

For the second file organizing command, add the file category matching rule, set the file category to 'Documents', add the last modification time matching rule and set the modification time rule to the last month. Set the action type to 'Copy' and enter an appropriate path to your archive disk.

For the third file organizing command, add the file category matching rule, set the category to 'Music Files' and set the access time rule to 'More Than X Months'. Set the action type to 'Move' and enter an appropriate path to your archive disk.

For the last file organizing command, add the file category matching rule, set the category to 'Images and Pictures' and set the creation time rule to 'More Than Y Months'. Set the action type to 'Execute Command' and enter the following command string: 'C:\Program Files\WinRar\rar a -r image_archive.rar'. All files that are matching the specified criteria will be compressed and added to the selected RAR archive.

FlexTk provides two distinct file organizing modes: the 'Preview' mode and the 'Stream' mode. The 'Preview' mode is especially useful during the design stage in order to ensure proper operation of a file organizing command. In the 'Preview' mode, FlexTk will process all the input directories and files, evaluate all the specified file matching rules and display a preview dialog showing the list of actions that should be performed.

In order to be able to verify your organizing command, select the 'Preview' mode and press the 'Save' button to save the file organizing operation. Once the organizing command is tested, it may be more effective to switch to the 'Stream' mode, which is especially optimized to perform all as fast as possible using a minimal amount of memory. In the 'Stream' mode, FlexTk will process all the input directories and files, evaluate the specified file matching rules and execute all the required actions on-the-fly without showing the preview dialog.

A user-defined file organizing command may be executed in a number of different ways. In the simplest case, just click on the command item in the user-defined commands tool pane. In addition, frequently used file organizing operations may be added to the user's desktop as direct shortcuts and executed in a single mouse click without the need to start the FlexTk main GUI application. Finally, FlexTk Professional and FlexTk Ultimate allow one to execute file organizing operations using the FlexTk command line tool. For detailed information about how to manage and execute user-defined commands refer to the User-Defined Commands page.