Keeping the hard disk in your desktop computer in good shape is not a simple task. Managing and organizing files on an external NAS server or an enterprise storage system is much more difficult. Pictures, movies, songs, documents, reports and application specific files are flooding into our computers and storage devices making in very complex to keep things organized. The problem becomes even more complicated due to the fact that everyone has his/her own specific needs and it is just impossible to develop a file organizing solution that will be good for everyone. The FlexTk file management toolkit includes built-in file classification, categorization and organizing capabilities allowing one to define user-specific file organizing rules, policies and actions especially tuned for the user's specific needs.

The FlexTk's file organizing engine provides the user with the ability to define a number of file classification rules and associate an action or user-defined command to be executed for all matching files. The user is provided with the ability to classify files by the file type, the file name, size, time, text and binary patterns. For each file organizing command, there is the ability to define multiple file classification rules in conjunction with the AND/OR logical operators. Files matching the specified classification rules may be copied, moved, deleted or processed with a custom user-defined command.

FlexTk allows one to save multiple file organizing commands and execute them simultaneously during a single pass through one or more file systems. In order to add a new file organizing command, select menu 'Organize - Edit Organize Commands' on the main menu bar and press the 'Add' button on the organizing commands dialog. The organizing command dialog allows one to select the action that should be executed and specify one or more file search criteria. An unlimited number of search criteria may be added to any file organizing command.

Now let's define four example file organizing commands that will clean-up temporary files, backup newly modified documents, move old music files to an external disk and archive old pictures to a RAR archive. All four commands will be executed simultaneously during a single pass through one or more file systems as you will see in the end of the tutorial.

The first file organizing command is very simple. Add the file category matching rule, set it to the 'Temporary Files' file class group and select the delete action type. All files that will be categorized as temporary files during the organizing process will be deleted. In order to eliminate the potential of accidental data loss, before executing delete actions it may be a good idea to search for files related to the same category and see what files are going to be deleted.

For the second file organizing command, add the file category matching rule, set the file category to 'Documents', add the last modification time matching rule and set the access time rule to the last week. Set the action type to 'Copy' and enter an appropriate path to your backup disk. For the third file organizing command, add the file category matching rule, set the category to 'Music Files' and set the access time rule to 'More Than X Months'. Set the action type to 'Move' and enter an appropriate path to your backup disk. For the last file organizing command, add the file category matching rule, set the category to 'Images and Pictures' and set the creation time rule to 'More Than Y Months'. Set the action type to 'Execute Command' and enter the following command string: 'C:\Program Files\WinRar\rar a -r image_archive.rar'. All files that are matching the specified criteria will be compressed and added to the selected RAR archive.

In order to start one or more file organizing commands, select one or more file systems in the file navigator and press the 'Organize' button located on the main toolbar. On the organizing commands dialog select the commands that should be executed and press the 'Start' button.