A Windows computer contains a lot of files and asking a computer illiterate to locate for some files on their computer can be a daunting task. I once even asked a computer technician to search for a file on a Windows computer which I am very sure its there but he kept on saying that the file couldn’t be found. I gave up and asked him to run a program to generate a file which lists all the folders and files on the computer and send it to me. After checking the listings, the file is located deep inside the hard drive and the technician finally managed to locate it after me letting him know the exact location of the file. Today I would like to introduce a software called Snap2HTML which takes a snapshot of folder structures on your harddrive and saves it as HTML files.
Snap2HTML is a free and portable tool that is able to generate a single HTML file listing all folders and files that you set it to crawl. All you need to do is run the Snap2HTML.exe file, select the folder that you would like it to crawl, and click the Create Folder Snapshot button. Finally select the location where you want to save the HTML report file. You can also include hidden and system files by checking the two checkboxes on the program.
Although there are many other similar tool that does the same thing, but what I personally like about the result file created by Snap2HTML is it gives you a “real” application feel which is similar to Windows Explorer, displaying a treeview with folders that you can click to view the files contained within. There is also a very useful built in file search in the HTML report file.
Sample report of the snapshot created by Snap2HTML. Click on the image to test it.
I would advice you to avoid creating a snapshot of the whole hard drive because you may end up with a relatively large HTML file that may cause the web browser to hang if you open it. Select only the necessary folder that you want to generate the listing. If you know HTML coding, you can actually edit the template.html file which is the base for the output, and you can modify it with your own enhancements. Snap2HTML runs on all versions of Windows and requires at least .NET Framework 2.0 installed.
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