What Does it Do - The Essentials?

MoveOut is a small Windows utility that will automatically move files from one directory to another and is authored by the developer “Skrommel” in a series of small utilities under the banner of “1 Hour Software”. It is a small freeware utility available from the DonationCoder website of which I am a great fan. For more details on how and why these utilities are written and who writes them see the post on DonationCoder Utilities.

Summary:

• Moves Files from one folder to another
• Files can be specified using rules and filters with wildcards
• Can be set to run automatically at Startup
• Can be started or stopped from the system tray Icon

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware
• Portable
• Small Memory requirement
• Simple to Use
• Versatile

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Error when wildcard *.* set when there is a subfolder in the source directory

More About What it Does in Detail:

Quote from the Donation Coder website:

MoveOut v1.2

205KB
Make rules to move files automatically.
Features:
- Right click the tray icon to configure
- Choose Settings to change rules and options
- Choose Enable to Start or Stop all the rules
Use it to make a rule that moves files from the desktop to a subfolder, based on file type, part of a filename, or whatever. Have it ask to replace existing files, or rename them. It can also ignore files.
Changes:
- 20061224 - v1.1: Added confirmation dialog before automatically running rules.
- 20070407 - v1.2: Added missing code to browse for folders.

System Tray Icon

Right click menu from system tray icon

Settings

Allows :

• Edit existing rules
• Add new rules (Insert)
• Turn rules on and off
• Reorder Rules

Edit Dialog

• Add paths for Source and Target folders
• Specify files to move including wildcards
• Specify files to ignore (no wildcards)
• Specify what to do if files exists in target directory

Options

About

What are the Technical Details & Compatibility?

What is the My Free Review Experience?

I have used this utility to automatically identify files based on part names or extensions to other drives and folders including network drives on a home LAN. It has done this efficiently and without loosing anything that I am aware of. In fact on the LAN when there has been a network problem with the “Rename” option set it has left the part file moved and then moved the complete file, renaming it with time/date added. I have not tested what happens if the rename option is not used but presume it would overwrite the part file.

Quite some time ago I decided to stop using multiple folders and subfolders to organise word documents, spreadsheets, PDF’s, presentations etc. and instead put everything into a single folder and use long file names with a “reverse” date(e.g. Barry - MoveOut Blog Post - 20080121.doc). You can see how MoveOut could now be used to move files based on part of the file name and/or file extension (which could be part of the reverse date) to another folder.

As the utility is completely portable and keeps the settings in an ini file in the program folder, it can be moved complete with rules for use on several computers.

All in all I rate this highly as:

Simple - Versatile - Powerful - Stable in use over several months

What Could Make it be Better?

Ability to set rules to copy instead of move.

Fix subfolder error when *.* used for filename.

Recurse subfolders (but would need to check subfolder is not a target for move)

What Other Posts are Relevant?

DonationCoder Freeware Utilities and Programs

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 8:31 am and is filed under Freeware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.