File Sift |
File Sift is a free utility to help organize data into folders that will fit on recordable media (ie CD or DVD). This makes backups to CD easier, and avoids the need to use archive formats that span cds and require all cds for restores.
Files can be grouped by name or by best fit, and will be moved to subdirectories to facilitate the recording process. This is ideal if you have a lot of data that you would like to backup and want to maximize the use of your blank media. (One example would be backing up a large directory of mp3's to CD)
File Sift is written in python and utilizes the wxPython library for the GUI interface. There is also a command line interface.
Currently there is very little documentation on how to use the utility, although I hope that it is somewhat self explanitory. This page is the start of documentation. If anyone would like to contribute in any way please send me email.
-Download the installation file from sourceforge here: file_sift-bin-1.0-win32.zip
-Unzip the zip file to your computer
-Run file_sift\file_sift.exe from the extracted directory
-Make sure you have python installed. I have tested this with python 2.2.
-If you want to use the gui interface, you will need to also install the wxPython library.
-Download the source file from sourceforge here: file_sift-src-1.0.zip
-unpack the source to a directory, and then run either the group_console.py script for console use, or the group_gui.py script for the gui interface.
python group_console.py -h
This is an example of backing up data for backup purposes only. Data stored to cds after file sift has sorted them can be accessed on thier own.
File Sift is not useful for doing full system backups for system recovery purposes. This program has no logic to work with lower level system configurations such as registries, configurations, permissions, etc. As with any back up you should verify the integrity of the backup by testing a restore of the data. This should be done *BEFORE* you actually *NEED* to restore. Use of File Sift is at your own risk. (See gnu license for details).
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