SmartCat 97

With the cost of removable storage coming down and the size of hard disks going up, it seems reasonable to assume that we're storing more and more files on our PCs. If you work in multimedia, DTP or design, you may have many files of different types all over your PC. Cataloguing and helping you to archive them is where SmartCat 97 comes in.

An extremely compact program, SmartCat ships on just two HDs or can be downloaded for evaluation. No manuals are supplied, but a tutorial and a fairly comprehensive help system is included, although the tutorial unhelpfully disappears every time you carry out an action in a full-screen window.

SmartCat 97 is tightly integrated with Windows Explorer, and the main screen could be easily mistaken for Explorer itself. On installation, SmartCat adds Archive and Catalog commands in the appropriate places in Explorer's menu system, enabling it to be run from within that application.

Archive lets you send files to floppies, Zip disks or other removable media. You can also create archive 'pools', which are archive collections. Any amount of removable media volumes can be part of an archive pool, and this could be particularly useful in business, as you could archive a set of files relating to one client. Unfortunately though, archived files can't span more than one disk, so don't think you'll be able to store that 2Mb spreadsheet on a couple of floppies. There is a possibility, however, that the ability to disk-span might be added in the future.

To archive files, you simply select them in Explorer, right-click them, and go for the Archive option. The selected files are copied to the removable media and you can then delete the originals. Once an archive has been created, its details, including the names of the files it contains, are then viewable in an Explorer-style window. Should the files be needed again, SmartCat includes search facilities so that you can locate them and then restore them with another couple of clicks.

Retrieving files is reminiscent of the shareware application WinZip - you just select a file within the archive, double-click it and it's copied to the Windows temporary directory, then opened in the original application. If you try this without the archive volume present, SmartCat tells you which volume you should insert.

The other main feature is, of course, cataloguing, which allows you to keep track of the contents of removable media. The contents of PKZIPed files, including self-extracting ZIP files, are also analysed and listed. There's a facility to add comments to folder and file names, and the resulting file lists can then be searched by name, date, size or text contained in those comments. I tested the cataloguing facility using PC Pro cover CDs, and while you can reduce the level of detail catalogued, it still took four or five minutes apiece to completely catalogue each CD on my test machine.

One final annoyance was that it was impossible to print a list of contents for an archive or catalogue, although this will apparently have been rectified by the time you read this. Overall, if you manage large quantities of files held on removable media, this powerful little utility could be a boon.

Author: Steve Cotterell