Windows Vista

I began looking for "the ideal" file & media management program in the 1980's and actually wrote my own because there was a complete lack of reasonable solutions.

DEP3.0 is among the finest pieces of sharewhare I've had the pleasure to work with (and I've worked with lots).

It has a clean user interface, an intuitive operation, and flexibility to organize collections in a variety of ways.

The software is also blindingly fast. I tried it first on a directory of 150Mb containing 100 Powerpoint files and a not so speedy laptop, expecting to take a coffee break. 17 seconds later, it was done and had produced a 250K database file with the file properties AND the document properties, including a thumbnail image of the first page of each file.

Next, I decided to put it to the supreme torture test: a highly structures file repository with 5300 nested subdirectories contain 4644 files, and 650Mb of data (representative of a very full data CD-ROM). I ran the test with the data on a mobile USB powered harddrive as well. (To really make it "unfair," My virus scanner kicked in during the test!

It analyzed the bohemoth of data in 8 minutes 47 seconds. So depending on the speed of your source medium and computer, 100Mb per minute processing time will be a fairly close estimate of cataloging speed.

The test produced a 20.5Mb database (quite compact, considering the complexity of the data). I don't know what data structure is used inside the database, but searches are nearly instantanous. A search for duplicate files took about 3 seconds. A detailed text file report of its findings (1.6Mb in size) took about the same amount of time.

Browsing through the resulting DB was a dream. It's everything Explorer should be (and more). Hover over a file, you'll see all the property details including format specific metadata. Hover over a folder, you'll see the folder properties, including the number of files and the amount of storage they use. Click on a folder, and you'll see the full name under the folder icon, while the status bar shows the folder properties, size, date, number of files an attributes.






So, where does one apply such a high performance tool?

1. Media cataloguing. If you have lots of data scattered across lots of CD's, diskettes, DVD's etc this is a create tool for creating a catalogue of the data you have.

2. Image management. While there are other tools out there designed specifically for images, I've never seen anything that could deal with this volume of data and this speed.

3. Image Worflow. For those more serious about image work, this is a seriously powerful tool for reinforcing good data management practices. It's easy to put comments on a volume, a folder or individual files.

4. It also does something few other programs have (though the DOS program I wrote in TurboPascal did): It captures the volume name and serial number of each analyze volume. This means that you can use serial numbers for something useful: filing the zillions of CD's in a fashion that makes them easy to retrieve.

5. When encountering audio media, DEP3 defaults to CDDB for track information, but allows you to configure to the database of your whimsy.

6. Deal with files on FTP servers. Yep, handles those too.

7. Hate to throw things away but don't want to continuously sift through junk? DED3 has a folder/file rating system. Don't want to see those awful photos? Rate them a 5 and set the options to not show any items rated a 5. You'll never have to see Aunt Bertha in her bikini again.

8. Trying to find just the right photo fast? Picasa has got great features but it begins to crawl when you're adding 40,000+ photos. DEP3 has a configurable thumbnail size. I upped the thumbnail size on my torture test archive. Processing time was nearly identical (leading me to confirm that the program bottlenecked on my USB 2 Mobile disk while using about 60% of my 1Ghz Pentium M CPU. The system was still very usuable in the foreground.

9. Curious where the space has gone? DEP3 gives you a nearly instantaneous breakdown by file extension with the number of each type and the total space consumed.

10. Curious about what's on a computer? The program is small enough to fit on a USB flash drive and automatically stores database files in its program directory. Hidden and system files don't hide from it. Compressed folders, zips, tars, rars all can get mapped. Encrypted files can't be read: but their directory entries can be seen and catalogued.

Is the program perfect? There are some features and ease of use items I'd like to see added. But as it stands today, it's easily the best program of its kind at a very reasonable price. It should be high on the list of anyone who deals with large numbers of files and/or files stored in a lot of different locations.