gettingStarted

Getting Started with FileScan

Updated 1/28/2013

Installation requirements

• Windows
• SQLCE 4.0 (installed automatically)
• DotNet 4.0 (installed automatically)

Concepts

• Why use FileScan?
  Do you have any critical files? Files that you do not want to lose under any circumstances? Files like family photos, tax returns, business data backups? You should have these files backed up, but that is not the end. How do you know 2 years from now if the files on your computer are completely undamaged? If you perform a monthly backup and 6 months later, a file becomes corrupt, then on the 7th month you are backing up corrupted files - probably without knowing it. You could do a compare operation with your backup software, but that would require you to mount your backups and it could be very time consuming. I wrote FileScan to take a snapshot of my critical files and store their hash's in a database. At any time, like a day before monthly backups, I can run FileScan and determine if any of my SAN files have been added to, removed, or corrupted - BEFORE I run the next backup.

Terminology

• FileRoot
  The FileRoot is base of the FileScan database. It is the node that contains all of the nodes you will define for scanning. It exists so that you can right-click it and scan all of your nodes with one click.

• Node
  A node is a representation of a folder tree from your Windows filesystem. You may add many nodes to the database to scan different groups of files, such as a music library, photos, a set of backup files, etc.

• MD5
  An MD5 is a numerical hash of your file, which FileScan uses to verify that the file has not been modified since the last scan.

First use

• Run the program. You should get a window with an empty database containing only ...FileRoot.
• Click on Folders -> Add Folder.
• Select a folder to add to the database. I.E. C:\somefiles.
  You have now added a node to the database. You may add an unlimited number of nodes to FileScan to keep track of separate filesystems, such as music, pictures, software, backups.
• Right-click your node and select scan all subfolders.
  FileScan will now compute the MD5 hashes of all of the files in the folder you added. At the bottom will be a status bar to show you how many new, missing, verified, failed, and moved files where detected. Since this is the first time we scanned this folder, all of the files should be "new".
• Click Accept to write all of the data to the FileScan database.
• At any time in the future, you can scan this folder, tree, individual file or group of files, and you will know if anything has changed since the last scan.