Free (or cheap) software you really love

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Deleted member 473

Inspired by a comment of Black Hole's, I thought this thread might be useful for us to share our experiences of good quality free software tools.

I will start the ball rolling with a recent discovery of mine. Having replaced my two ageing NASs with a Synology one, and having used AllwaySync for years to make copies of important files on my laptop to the NAS, I hit some problems in the transition. To cut a long story short, AllwaySync has problems with file dates when Syncing and the developer said they don't mirror the file dates to a NAS anyway. The result was endless error messages at each sync, so I was looking for alternatives.

There is a free tool called SyncToy from Microsoft, but in the past I experienced times when it didn't copy every file, and never got to the bottom of why.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=15155

My current recommendation is FreeFileSync, which is easy to use and appears to do an admirable and efficient job. Like AllwaySync, you can get it to monitor folders and Sync in the background, though I generally prefer to sync manually.

http://freefilesync.sourceforge.net/
 
DVD Burning - Best fit to Disk

If like me you archive a lot of recordings for later listening/viewing you want to get the most efficient use of your disks.

CDBurnerXP will let you drop a folder full of files into it and calculate the optimum way to burn them so that the minimum space is lost on each disk.

And as with the majority of the software I use there is a portable version available.

https://cdburnerxp.se/en/home
 
Mike0001 said:
My current recommendation is FreeFileSync, which is easy to use and appears to do an admirable and efficient job. Like AllwaySync, you can get it to monitor folders and Sync in the background, though I generally prefer to sync manually.
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I use rsync. It's free with any Linux, so obviously a no-brainer with the CF.
 
I know its from Google but Picasa 3 has been my favoured free photo editor / organiser for many years.
 
Avast! antivirus. It makes the paid-for options more obvious to click than the free updates, but nonetheless it can be used for free.
 
VideoReDo TVSuite with H.264 is a very useful and cheap video editing package, I don't know why people mess around with free software.:)
 
Brian said:
VideoReDo TVSuite with H.264 is a very useful and cheap video editing package.
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+1 on this.

VideoRedo is my absolute favourite software for video editing, you can add chapters to existing videos, remove audio streams etc. it is such a Swiss army knife for video files.
 
The file scanned was 'FreeFileSync_6.6_Windows_Setup.exe', the executable installer, all details are shown in the picture. do you know of a website where FreeFileSync.exe can be downloaded?, The 'Open Candy' stuff detected may not be harmful but I would be happier if it wasn't there
How did I get OpenCandy on my computer?

Software developers use OpenCandy’s plug-in to display a single software advertisement in their installers, and you are given complete control over whether or not you install the advertised software. Chances are that you have downloaded software at some point in the last few years that contains an OpenCandy plug-in.
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Download Accelerator Plus (free).
http://www.speedbit.com/downloads/
Used it for over 15 years now. "Does what it says on the packet".
Two points:
- care when installing, make sure you read/untick boxes else you could end up loading other speed it products as well (Video accelerator ..).
- it is also very good at capturing the DNLA file from the hummy, as long as you find out the server file id/path first (http://192.168.1.52:9000/web/media/1203.TS).
No need to decrypt file first!
 
GoodSync (free trial, unlimited time/limited function) but $29.99 for product for life.
http://www.goodsync.com
High functionality, constantly being enhanced.
I use it to back up my critical files to NAS overnight.
Any failure can trigger an email to your chosen id.

I had a couple of minor glitches in the past, raised a problem report. The response and fix were back within 24 hours, not bad considering they are US based.

It is capable of much more than just backup, it will sync files as well if required.
Easy to use, decent user interface, plenty of flexibility.

Unlike many backup tools (ghost, comodo,a cronies, ...) files are note encoded or stored in a way that means that you need the original software to get them back. They are directly readable from Windows.
Don't need special scheduling software for unattended. Goodsync generates Windows Task Scheduler entries.
My PC wakes up at predefined times (generally set for middle of night) performs backup and the closes down (emails me if there is a problem).

Give it a try, I spent quite a lot of times testing other products before settling on this one.
In distance past I used SyncToy but it was a bit primitive really.
 
Ezra Pound said:
The file scanned was 'FreeFileSync_6.6_Windows_Setup.exe', the executable installer, all details are shown in the picture. do you know of a website where FreeFileSync.exe can be downloaded?, The 'Open Candy' stuff detected may not be harmful but I would be happier if it wasn't there
Click to expand...

I think OpenCandy is part of the installer. It is one of those installers that, by default, loads other programs, but when you do a custom install you can uncheck all the boxes. So far my version hasn't produced any adverts, and Spybot thinks all its files are clean.
 
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