We all have our own share of private folders and information that should be kept away from prying eyes; that however rarely happens and most of the times for a wide range of reasons files are deleted, moved or even changed. In order to effectively detect these annoying occurrences, developers have been quick to provide us with monitoring solutions and this next tool is just that - FolderMon.

What is FolderMon ?

FolderMon is a smart, flexible and simple to use utility designed to help you monitor multiple disk locations in order to detect just about any data change including file modification, deletion, attribute change and more. It does all this in real-time, has a customizable set of features with control over triggers and actions.

One of the best things about FolderMon is that it runs smoothly and once and once setup, may run unobtrusively in the system tray only alerting you when needed.

FolderMon can take in any type of file regardless of size and number; what's more, from within the program you can send e-mail notifications, perform a choice of custom actions, save disk monitoring reports, watch over certain file types and enable the execution of user-defined monitoring commands with pre-defined desktop shortcuts.

The application has an intuitive and comprehensively laid out graphical interface making it very simple to use and targeted at both novice and advanced users. If you want to start monitoring a directory, simply enter its name and press Monitor. That's all there is to it.

If you haven't tempered with the settings, FolderMon will automatically monitor file system changes such as creating new files, changing contents, file names, attributes, deleting data etc. You can choose from multiple system change events from the Events tab.

When a change is detected, it will automatically be displayed within the interface. You can actually Pause monitoring and restart it at any point in time. Pressing Stop will effectively finish the monitoring process.

When dealing with multiple alerts, you can always categorize and apply filters; this makes it a lot easier to see the file you were looking for. The list of files is also constantly being updated as the monitoring process goes on.

The ability to export is an important part of the program allowing users to save in the XML file format. This is quickly accessible by using the Save Report button from the main toolbar. From the Reports tab, you can view the disk monitoring changes for the last 1000 system changes.

Another interesting feature implemented in FolderMon is the flexibility provided by the rules and actions. It works like this: when a condition has been satisfied, the action is triggered. This turns FolderMon into a highly customizable application and highly appealing to an advanced user. You can bring up 3 types of actions as follows: Beep Action, Email Action and User Defined Command Action. This is being done from the Actions tab of the Basic Options dialog.

Associated with actions are the rules which point out to the action name of the action which will be invoked. This may apply to sending e-mail notifications about changes in critical directories or files. User can define E-Mail actions in the 'Actions' tab of 'Basic Option' dialog.

Configure you e-mail account settings so that you can receive notifications each time an e-mail action has been satisfied.

The application is compatible with multiple Windows systems including Xp, Vista and 7.

Overall we found FolderMon to satisfy just about all needs a disk / directory monitor utility should fulfill. It is highly flexible and easily customizable solution within a well thought out graphical user interface. It is aimed at all user levels regardless of experience or know how so give it a try and see for yourself.

For more information, please watch the movie that contains installation and complete features demo

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