Monday, November 5, 2007

Efficient and reliable file management

We all know Microsoft explorer. We all know the millions of products that copy it. We also know, from earlier times, the Commander software and we should at least have seen a few of the millions of products that copy it. None of them suits my needs, unfortunately.

Status Quo


Efficiency is everything in my daily life with computers. You should be able to accomplish every task with the minimal count of keystrokes, and have every task freely pausable, stoppable and resumable, if technically possible. And, of course, you need to parallelize tasks and have them reliable work next to each other.
For the Microsoft Explorer, for example, reliability is something unknown. In the default configuration, if one explorer window, or some seemingly unrelated system-task crashes, it takes all your copy operations with you. And it's impossible to resume copy operations with the Microsoft Explorer. I have to admit that the new version shipped with Windows Vista is a complete overhaul and does address some of the main issues I had with XP and earlier Windowses. First, I like the Task-dialogs. Task-dialogs give you big, recognizable buttons with labels that actually tell you what they do after you click them, including a small, detailed explanation beneath them. This is a good example for intuitive, yet non-intrusive user-interface design. But the new Explorer still fails at reliably resuming copy operations or predicting the results of those. For example, you can't specify whether you want the timestamps of the files to be copied stay the same or are updated to 'now'. When moving files, the timestamps don't change. When copying files, they're updated. But, especially when copying files when transferring some large amounts of data that's in daily use, I want the timestamps to stay the same! And it may actually be a big problem if they change, for backup-reasons. No chance with Explorer.

Requirements


Additionally, I want to see both progress in bytes and percent. And I want to see speed in a unit like MByte/s or MBit/s and a reliable prediction of the ETA. Here, too, the new Vista Explorer does a better job than it's XP counterpart. I guess everybody already became victim of a 500kb file that, according to Explorer, would take 32038 days to copy from the CD to your hard disk.
Then, to increase throughput, you might want to fine-tune some parameters like the buffer-size. The buffer-size can be very important in copy operations depending on the source and destination. For example, for a network source from a SMB-share to your local hard-drive or from one hard-drive to the other, you should use very different buffer-sizes. The hard-drives should cope with much bigger buffers than the network-protocol-bound SMB transfer (this is still speculation at this time, though).
Finally resume-operations should be fully customizable. I want options like 'Always overwrite newer', 'Ask if size differs', 'Always overwrite smaller', 'Check file-contents if smaller' and much more. I need those for various situations. You use file-copy operations in many different scenarios that all require different behavior.
A great feature would be to postpone files that the software is unsure about to the end. It happened *so* often that I started a large (like a few hours) file-operation and came back just to see that it asked me for the fifth file whether I want to hug, seize or overwrite it. If it skipped that file and already copied all the others, it would've saved me hours of either my free-time or my work-time.

User-interface


Let's take the Explorer-example, again. In Explorer, you can do everything with the keyboard. But maybe not as easily as you wanted. Jumping to a new address can become a hassle. I noticed that the hotkey to jump to the address-pane changed in every small update the explorer ever got. I think it was already set to each character that you can find in 'address', namely a, d, r, e and s. In the Vista-explorer, you don't even know how to jump to the breadcrumb-style address-pane. But I'll tell you a secret: It's Alt+D. For now, it might change next week.
But still, everything you can do in Explorer you can relatively "easy" do with they keyboard. But there are just things you can't do with Explorer. Selecting files by pattern? Nope. You can use the search-function as a workaround, which isn't optimal and only suits some limited needs. Imagine a dir filled with hundreds of seemingly random files and you want to delete all that start with an A and end in .xxx. Maybe only if they have the archive-bit set or have some special UNIX-permissions. Or only directories. You simply can't, and have to pick them by hand. I want a mixed Regular Expression and file-attribute filter to select my files to delete, copy or move them.

Roundup


So here's a feature round-up that I demand from a file-management-software:
- Large number of options for file-transfers
- Resumable operations
- Independent, parallel operations
- Postponing files that it is not sure about
- User-interface completely keyboard-compatible
- Selection by regex and file-attribute filtering, maybe recursive
- Command-line as an alternative to GUI would be awesome!

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