Tag Archives: drive

Allway Sync – sync files from drive to drive with ease!

Leave a Reply

A couple of days ago, I was looking for a quick easy way to sync my files to and from my network drive. It’s a pain usually, because I end up manually copying and moving files every couple of weeks, and after a while it just becomes a hassle.

So, I went browsing around the internet to find a good, free piece of software to sync all my files. And I found one.

It’s called Allway Sync. It’s a free application that will sync all my files to and from my internet and external hard drives. Not only that, but it will also sync my files from my FTP server or USB drive.

It works really well, and since it’s free it can’t be beaten! It’s received many reviews from various download sites saying exactly what I do – that it’s a brilliant program.

If you don’t like manually syncing files via copy and paste, this is the program for you!

Update 4.10.09 – I liked this program so much I actually went online and bought the software. The only reason I bought it was because the free version only gives you a certain amount of usage per month. If you use the software excessively it will warn you before locking you out of the software’s features. You then have to pay for the software. I found a website that would sell me the software for £11.00 and it worked fine. Just click buy from regnow.com and all should be fine. The purchase gives you access to all updates in the future.

Find the biggest files on your hard drive

3 Replies

Today I was quite shocked when I looked at my hard drive’s free space to find that over 70% was full, and I couldn’t work out why the hell it was so full.

So I thought I’d better check out where my biggest files were on the computer – but sadly Windows has no real way of sorting your whole hard drive into file size (at least not Vista, anyway) which is a bit of a bummer.

So I did a quick Google, and found a very useful free application which will search your computer for the 100 biggest files on your hard drive. It’s really easy to use and setup as there is no installation – you just download the 258kb file and run it. You can then navigate to the folders with the files you don’t want and delete them.

You just need to go to this site and download file with the ‘free download’ link. Then just run it and let it search your hard drive.

It helped me free up just over 12GB on my hard drive which was really handy since I need some space for the upcoming Windows 7 RC release.

Anyway, there you have it. A really handy application which I’ll place on the GEEK! Recommends page.

Freecom Network Drive and Linux (Ubuntu to be specific)

2 Replies

I get a lot of Google searches relating to the Freecom Network Drive and Linux. They seem to relate to not being able to get it work properly, but I haven’t really posted much about the FND on Linux because… I just don’t use Linux. So for the benefit of my readers, I decided I’d take a leap of faith and download an ISO of Ubuntu just to see whether I could get it going.

And, frankly, I’m not totally sure what all the fuss is about. People seem to claim that they can’t access the drive or the config panel for it. But I didn’t have any problem at all – I just got Ubuntu working and connected to my wifi and it almost worked immediately. I could get to my network drive config panel at 192.168.1.2 (in my case, different users have different IPs) – just logged in as normal and it went easy peasy. Then as for getting to files, the Network window detected my drive most of the time and displayed all the folders and if not I could just do a local FTP and that worked just fine.

I’m not sure if people were/are having problems with other versions of Linux… but I mean it shouldn’t really make much difference. If you want to drop me a line or leave a comment with your Network Drive Ubuntu related problem and I’ll happily investigate for you. At the moment, I just don’t see much of a problem, so I need some more details.

If you are having problems, let me know and I’ll look into it for you.

Update on the faulty Freecom drive

2 Replies

After my complaints to Freecom regarding their poorly manufactured Network Drive they finally got back to me today to tell me that they would be sending me a brand new drive – thank god.

They will send me a postage label which I can attach to the box and return to them, and then they will send me a new one. 

To be fair their customer service lines were pretty good and the corresponding emails were quick and easy to understand so +1 on that note.

It’s just sad that I was the one who got the bad drive.

Ah well, I’ll update again when the new drive arrives.

Freecom Network Drive – Can I recommend it or not?

Well, I recently purchased a Freecom Network Drive from Freecom themselves and so far I’m having no end of problems. 

When it got here, looked fine – no damage physically or anything noticable. Opened the box, checked all the components had come in one piece, and hooked it up to my router. Then went to the computer, checked the network had recognised it and it had. Click its logo and hang on… very slow…

So I tried going to the config page and seeing if I needed to set anything up. Still very slow but I got in – hard drive recognised, all seemed to be OK.

Several hours later I still couldn’t work it out. It was taking 30 seconds or so to load a page and adding a new folder resulted in an error and the a crash. I didn’t even bother trying to put a file on it.

As a last resort, I did a hard reset and tried again, and now its not even detecting a hard drive.

I will be sending back to Freecom and if they wont fix it I’ll be requesting my money back and I will look elsewhere. It seemed like a really good deal because I’d heard how good the Network Drive Pro’s were and the prive for a standard 500gb drive seemed almost too good to be true compared to many other companies.

So, if you want my advise, if you need a simple network drive for your home, don’t look at Freecom.

There are updates to this post at:

(21st Oct 08) http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/10/21/update-on-the-faulty-freecom-drive/

(4th Dec 08) http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/12/04/update-on-the-freecom-network-drive/

(13th Dec 08) http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/12/13/the-working-freecom-network-drive-review/