Recently in Compression Category

SHJunction is a small freeware application to manage NTFS virtual folders.

What is a virtual folder?
A virtual folder is sometimes called a junction point or (pseudo) symbolic link. It is a folder that is actually a link to another folder. For example, a person could create a virtual folder called "C:\AFOLDER" that is a link to "E:\ACTUALLY\THIS\FOLDER". In this way, a virtual folder is an alias for another folder.

What use is this?
There are many uses for virtual folders.
One use is to move a folder such as My Documents to another volume (drive) with more available space without having to change the path of the My Documents folder. To do this one would move the My Documents folder to another volume, then create a new virtual folder where the My Documents folder originally was that links to the folder on the other volume.
Another use is to make a long (deep) path into a short one. For example, a virtual folder "C:\SMALLPATH" that links to "C:\SOME REALLY\LONG\PATH".

What if I delete a virtual folder?
One should only remove virtual folders from within SHJunction or a compatible application. Most file managers delete folders recursively, so they will usually delete the 'real' target folder (and/or contained files) along with the virtual folder.

How does this work?
Virtual Folders are actually folders that are NTFS reparse points of the 'mount' type. Introduced in NTFS v5 (Windows 2000), they are file system objects, and therefore will persist even if you uninstall SHJunction or access the volume from a different computer or operating system installation.
The terminology behind reparse points is somewhat convoluted. Junction points, symbolic links, soft links, hard links, and virtual folders are just some of the terms used to refer to different types and applications of NTFS reparse points.
NTFS reparse points are used by the Disk Manager to mount a volume to a subfolder. So with SHJunction you'll see any volumes you have mounted to a subfolder of another volume. SHJunction does not allow you to remove these mount points for safety concerns. You should use the Disk Manager to change how your volumes are mounted.
Reparse points can also be used on files, commonly referred to as hard-links. However, SHJunction does not currently support file reparse points since this is less commonly useful and would complicate use of SHJunction.

So if Windows supports it at the device level, why hasn't Microsoft built reparse point creation into explorer?
Apparently Microsoft believes this technology might cause confusion to the end user.
However, the lack of true explorer support means that reparse point deletion isn't handled as gracefully as it should be and can result in accidental deletion of the 'real' backing folder.
They had planned to add this support to Windows Vista, but have now backed out of that.

Omziff is a straightforward encryption utility that uses various cryptographic algorithms to encrypt and decrypt textual files. These algorithms include: Blowfish, Cast128, Gost, IDEA, Misty1, AES/Rijndael, and Twofish.

Omziff also generates random passwords, splits files, and does secure file deletion according to DOD Standards. It is freeware, comes in a standalone executable file with no dependencies and is a completely USB portable application!

Why doesn't Omziff use 448 bit keys?
Believe it or not, using a 448-bit encryption key will not necessarily make your sensitive data anymore secure than a using 128 bit key. The formost encryption expert, Bruce Schneier, has written extensively on this and the explanation can be found in his paper, on "cryptographic key length". This is by far, the most comprehensive explanation I have come across to date. There are some other good discussions on basic encryption techniques.

What can I use to help me securely store my passwords?
There is a fantastic application which is also open source, called PINS, which incidentally is one of the many applications featured in the complete

Why can't Omziff integrate itself into the context menu as a shell extension?
I wrote Omziff so it would be a standalone application that is USB portable. To create shell extensions would require writing to the Windows system registry. There are, however, several good encryption software which do this.

Smart NTFS Recovery is a NTFS recovery tool for Windows operating system that supports the NTFS file system. The software easily recovers data from hard disks and any type of storage media - flash drives, USB drives, memory stick, PC card, multimedia card, secure digital card with NTFS file system.

Smart NTFS Recovery can recover any deleted files, including MS Office files, photos, mp3 and zip files!

This application is a free reliable file splitter that lets you split your large files (like Self-Extracting archives, Zip archives, disk images, multimedia, music, video, backup, image, archive, log, large text, document files...) into a set of smaller files called pieces.

These pieces are easier to:

• copy to floppy or any removable media disks.
• distribute over the Internet, networks.
• send by email (forget attached file size restrictions imposed by some ISP, pop3, SMTP and other e-mail servers).
• archive to CD, DVD, USB Flash drive and key, Zip disk, and any other storage device.
• upload to host accounts, file delivery services, online file hosting sites... that have restrictions on file sizes.
• share with friends, colleagues or other users through networks and the Internet.
• exchange using Instant Messaging clients or Instant Messenger programs...

What can GSplit do?

In addition to the features of other standard file splitters, GSplit can:

• Let you select from two basic file splitting options: disk spanned (split into a set of files varying in size auto-calculated by GSplit based on available free disk space and saved immediately to spannable removable disks) or blocked (split into a set of same sized split files). You may enter the size for each piece file, the number of pieces you want to obtain, or the number of lines/occurrences of a pattern by piece.
• Make pieces Self-Uniting: GSplit creates a small stand-alone executable file that will put all of the pieces back together. This executable provides your users with an intuitive Windows interface whose appearance can be customized according to your needs. GSplit is then not required in order to restore the split file.
• Store file properties like file dates and attributes, and restore them contrary to batch files.
• Perform fast checks (size, offset, CRC32) in order to detect file corruption and to give you the assurance that your files are successfully restored by your users. When a piece is corrupted, you are notified about it, so you just need to get a new copy of that piece, not the whole set.
• Split very large files, bigger than 4 GB.
• Customize piece files according to your needs (size, filenames, title, author...), leave additional space on disks, create pieces without tags or with custom headers (useful for text-based files like large server log or CSV files).
• Support splitting multiple files back-to-back in one time.
• A portable edition is available with no required installation.
• Include batch (automation) and command line options: GSplit can work as a daemon.
• Work in your own language: multilanguage support is available (English, French - Français...) for GSplit, GUnite and Self-Uniting programs.
• Split large text and similar files like large server logs and other CSV files by number of lines or occurrences of a specified pattern. Optionally insert headers into each piece file.
• Show you elapsed and estimated times while splitting and uniting files. You can also pause/resume the splitting operation.
• Keep settings into profiles and let you use these settings for different files, remember MRU files and folders, automatically try to find out the best splitting settings...
• Integrate Windows Explorer to let you split your files directly from the context menu.
• Work on all Windows versions, including Windows Vista.

ToolBox is a set of tools for doing synchronization, comparisons and replacement of data in files. It consists of the three tools File Synchronize, File Compare and File Replace, all contained in one single application.

File Synchronize does a simple one-way synchronization between sets of folders. These are arranged in groups for easy selection in different situations. The synchronization process is divided in two parts. The first part will search through the selected folders, listing all local and remote files, and then analyze these lists to determine which files/folders needs to be copied and which needs be erase to make the target folders match the source.

Synchronization can be done in both direction easily be changing between Recieve and Send. Send will make the remote folders match the local folders, receive will do the upper-site.

The second tool in the box is File Compare, originally build for verifying that CD's where burned correctly, back in the early days of CD burning. Given a source and target folder, it starts by recursivly listing all files in the source folder. Then it goes through this list, looking for the corresponding files in the target folder and, if found, compares them.

The compare can be done either on the file details alone (size, date, etc.) or as a binary comparison on all data in the files. Optionally the program can be set up to take an action after each comparison, removing source or target files/folder that have be compare successfully.

The third and currently last tool is File Replace. It is a very simple tool for doing search and replace of text in multiple files. Given a search string, a folder and file mask, it first searches recursively through all the files matching the file mask, opens them and locates any occurrences of the search string. The result of this search is listed, after which the files can be processed and have the search string replaced.

The userinterface is constructed using a small skinning engine allowing a completely custom look. One standard skin is bundled to start with. More skins may come later depending on the available developer resources.

ToolBox includes multilingual support, allowing it instantly to change all texts in the user interface to a different language. Only a few languages are available a the moment, additional languages can be added given some help for translating the texts.

Advanced Shell for UPX 3.01 is a friendly front-end Windows shell for UPX version 3.01. UPX (Ultimate Packer for eXecutables) is the best executable file compressor around, typically reducing the size of executables and DLLs by 50% to 70%. This reduction in size reduces disk space requirements, network load times, download times, storage costs, and make distribution much easier.

The front-end interface for UPX is not the easiest to work with, so we designed Advanced Shell as a friendly and efficient front end that runs under all versions of Windows. Advanced Shell allows you to have easy control of all the UPX features without needing knowledge of the UPX commands and options. Advanced Shell makes your UPX work more effective and comfortable.

Programs and libraries compressed by UPX are completely self-contained and run exactly as they did before compression, with no runtime or memory penalty for most supported formats. UPX supports a wide range of executable formats, including Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP programs and DLLs, DOS programs, and Linux executables.

Windows Explorer context menu extension allows you to compress your executables directly from Windows Explorer. Right click on exe-file and select point "UPX compress..."

Emilsoft FireBackup is the most advanced Firefox profile backup and restoration solution. Supporting both Online and Offline backup, you can rest assured that your Firefox Preferences, Cookies, and Bookmarks will always be backed up before reinstalling Windows.

When used with a free Emilsoft Forums membership, you receive access to an Emilsoft Online Backup Storage Account, which lets you store your backups safely on Emilsoft's servers.

This program will Backup your data/music/movies/documents/etc,.. automatically on a pre-scheduled time.
Simply select the time of the day you want the backup to occur, and then select the source directory to backup and the target directory to backup to.
The program includes options to run on windows startup or to arrange the backup directories by dates.
It will auto. minimize to the systray to help you monitor its state by right clicking on it.