It’s not particularly unusual for your hard drive to show activity when you don’t really expect there to be any, and you’re not quite sure why. Most of the time, it will be perfectly normal things that don’t really require your attention, but sometimes a program might be writing to the drive far more than it needs to. Or even worse, you could have a piece of rogue software trying to set itself up in the Users folder, or a virus calmly going about it’s business of infecting your files. It would be pretty useful from time to time to be able to see what exactly is being written to a drive or folder.
Not too long ago, I wrote about some tools that can monitor changes to a folder, and then send you notifications when certain conditions are met, and they all did the job. But the utility I’m talking about here I thought was worth a mention in its own right for a couple of reasons. The first and main reason is it was released after I wrote the previous article! Secondly, the utility’s developer certainly deserves a mention because he never lets us down with the quality and usefulness of everything he creates. Nir Sofer of Nirsoft is famous for small, simple and functional tools that don’t offer interfaces cluttered with functions you don’t need. They do the job they were created for, and my USB toolkit is full of them.
The tool in question is FolderChangesView and handles the task of actively monitoring folders or complete drives in real time, and tells you which files have been modified, created or deleted. It doesn’t offer to give popup windows or allow the running of scripts on a file create or delete trigger, but instead shows all the changes in the main FolderChangesView window. This is certainly more of a diagnostic or troubleshooting tool then other tools of this type. It doesn’t offer system monitoring as comprehensive as something like Sysinternals Process Monitor, but instead focuses on this one task.
As with all Nirsoft tools, FolderChangesView is a tiny download of under 50K and is completely portable, no .NET requirements like so many portable tools these days. It is also compatible with just about any O/S from Windows 2000 up to Windows 8 32bit and 64bit.
When the utility is started, it will pop up a window asking for the base folder to monitor and a checkbox for monitoring all the subfolders below the base folder. ‘C:\’ is the default option but obviously can be whatever folder or drive you wish. A folder requester would have been useful here for deep down folders because the location has to be typed in, or copied.
After that, the program will start to monitor modifications, creations or deletions and display how many times each action has occurred. Other information such as the full path to the file, the file’s extension, and the time of the first event, last event that happened for each file. Then you can identify by looking at the numbers if any files are being excessive with their actions, or you don’t recognise the file causing the excess activity.
The customary option to create a report file is there which can be in html, csv, xml and txt. To change the folder to monitor while the program is open, press ‘F9’ or go to ‘Options‘ -> ‘Choose Base Folder’.
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