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Backups are important. Sure, it can be a pain in the neck to set them up and run them, but the first time your system dies and you lose the last week (or month or year) of work, you'll be glad you decided to suck it up and do them.

Getting an easy-to-use tool to help you do your backups can go a long way toward making sure they happen. Anything that's hard to use or that has a clunky interface isn't going to help. Back4Sure may be the app that helps you decide to take control. With an easy "click a folder to include it in your backup" interface, it's easy to include (and exclude) what you want to back up. Within directories, you can build filters to further select the files you're interested in or apply your filters to your entire backup. There's no proprietary file format here—everything is stored in standard Zip or 7Zip files, so you aren't dependent on this tool for getting your stuff back.

Back4Sure is a Windows application. It can be used by anybody running Win98 or later.

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Everything in the world is connected. This is especially true with computer stuff. There are servers talking to servers, and desktop machines, smart phones, and all manner of other electronic goodies that talk to one another. The wonder of it all is that for the most part, they each understand what the other is saying. There is one notable exception, of course: the lowly text file.

Even though the text file is arguably the least-complicated kind of file out there, they are not all created equally. Even though these files are just text, no pictures, no formatting, no fancy stuff, there are differences between text files, depending on where a given file was created. Those differences all come with the end-of-line character–the way that your computer knows that one line has ended and the next one begins.

In the Unix world, the end of a line in a text file is indicated by the LineFeed character (0×0A), in the world of the Mac (at least through OS 9) it's the Carriage Return character (0×0D), and in DOS and Windows, it's the combination of the two (0×0D and 0×0A). While some apps are tolerant of these differences, others aren't nearly so well behaved. Create some web server configuration file on your Mac and upload it to your Unix web server, and you'll see what a mess things can be.

The solution? It could be something as simple as Flip, a little utility app that you can download. It's just a console app–no fancy GUI here–that allows you to convert files from one format to another. You can use it on single files, or on a whole bunch of them. A command line argument tells it which flavor you want your resulting files to be.

Flip is available in versions for Linux, Mac, and Windows machines.

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Windows Explorer is the built-in file management tool for Windows systems. Generally it gets done what needs to get done, but it certainly isn't the most efficient tool out there. It's pretty much unchanged over the past several versions of Windows and just doesn't give you much of what you expect in other more modern applications. Like tabs. If you want to dig through two separate directories at the same time, you have to open two windows. In the modern world, you use tabs to take care of that.

It may be time to take a look at xplorer². This replacement tool for file management boasts a tabbed interface, as well as several other goodies. Open multiple panes at once so you can easily drag-and-drop files between locations. You can set up file masks so if you're looking for TXT files in a particular location, you're not going to be buried under all the DOC files in that same spot.

You can grab the free version of xplorer² for your Windows system (Win95 and later). Feel free to use it for personal or academic work. If you want to take it to work with you, you'll need to grab the Pro version for a few bucks.

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When you're really zooming along, don't you just hate to have to take your hands off the mouse? You're flying along and everything's going great. You're copying and pasting to beat the band. And then it happens: you have to color outside the lines. Maybe you want to copy a path, or maybe you need to grab all the DOC files in a particular directory, or even open a DOS window. Everything grinds to a screeching halt as you take you hand off the mouse and start flailing through menus and dialogs looking for just the right command.

If this sounds familiar, you may want to check out Lammer Context Menu. An extension for Windows Explorer, it adds all kinds to extra functionality to the your context (right-click) menu. From a single menu entry, you can open submenus for Folder and File tweaks. Do bulk file renaming, open in Notepad, calculate checksums, and more.

Lammer Context Menu is a free download. It's a Windows app and runs under XP and later. You'll also need to make sure you've got .NET Framework version 3.5.

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Macs are cool. Windows machines are cool. There are lots of similarities between them, and lots of differences. If your work or play takes you back and forth between the two platforms, the similarities can be helpful. As a rule of thumb, if your Windows machine does something by pressing the [Control] key and some other key—like copying to the clipboard via [Control] + C—your Mac will probably do similar things by pressing the [Command] key instead. PC is [Control], Mac is [Command]. Not too bad.

But then there are the differences. In Windows, you can start an app by selecting its icon and pressing [Enter]. On your Mac, once you select that icon, you've got to use [Command] + O to do the same thing. Not so helpful. But there are ways to work around that. One of those ways is PresButan.

This Mac tool lets you choose to use the [Return] or the [Enter] key (no, they're not the same on a Mac) to start applications. By employing some fancy sleight-of-hand involving enabling support for assistive devices via the Universal Access Preference Panel, you can add this Windows-y functionality to your Mac. As an added bonus, you can add one other tweak as well: the ability to delete a file by selecting its icon and pressing the [Delete] key. No more [Command] + [Delete] or right-click and "Move to Trash" with the mouse. Hey, it's not much, but it could be kind of handy.

PresButan is a Mac application. It requires OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) or later. There's also still an older version to use on your Panther (10.3) system if you prefer.

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When you want to create a new file, most of the time you just fire-up the application that works with those files, choose File >> New from the menu, and go from there. Make your edits, tweak your tweaks, and then save the document, picture, or code module to whatever directory you want it to land in. That's the way you've always done it. It's reasonably quick, but having to navigate up and down the directory tree to find your new file's ultimate location can be a bit of a pain in the neck.

If you've noodled around in Windows for a while, you know there's another way to create new files. In Windows Explorer, if you first navigate to a particular directory and then right-click your mouse. In the context menu that comes up, you see "New" down at the bottom. Mouse over that and you get a flyout menu that lists new file types you can create. Click on one of those and you get a new Word DOC, a new Photoshop PSD, or some other new file. It's quicker, it's easier, and your new file is in the right place right out of the gate—no more navigating all over the place when you save your file.

ShellMenuNew lets you play with the types of files you can create in this way. Fire it up, and you'll get a list of all the file types in your Registry that you can create "New" in this way. Want to disable one? Piece of cake. And if you're smart (or brave), you can go into the Registry and tweak the particulars for a given entry. Just remember, though, that editing the Registry by hand can do great things, or it can turn your nice computer into a not-so-nice boat anchor.

ShellMenuNew is a free download. It's a Windows application and will run under Windows 2000 and later.

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After you've used your system long enough, your nice, clean, pristine hard drive is all full of junk. You've got apps you've downloaded, installed, and then removed. You've got duplicate files. And in many cases, you've got empty directory folders that once held great hope but now hold—nothing! Nobody in their right mind is going to go on an all-day expedition looking for empty directories, but still it would be nice to be rid of them.

Vanity Remover is a tool with a single purpose: it finds and deletes empty directories. Pick a starting point, and it will traverse the directory structure recursively from there on down as deep as it goes. If you start at the top, it will find every empty directory on your drive. As with all good GUI apps, you can type that starting directory into the textbox, you can browse to your directory, or just drag-and-drop a folder into the application's main window. No matter how you get there, all you need to do is click the button, and they'll all automagically disappear.

So what's the deal with the name? I know about vanity as "I'm all that and a bag of chips." I'm familiar with the bathroom fixture that incorporates a sink, countertop, and enclosed cabinet. But "vanity" referring to file folders? Not too sure on that one. Perhaps lost in translation.

Vanity Remover is a free Windows application.

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Your computer has all kinds of important and sensitive stuff on it. Financial information, proprietary work files, names and addresses of all your contacts, and more is just sitting there. This is all well and good while you're using it, but at some point it all needs to go away. Maybe you're upgrading your box and want to donate your system to your kid's school, or you're planning to make a few bucks by putting it up on Craigslist. Or maybe it's gone beyond its useful life and you're going to be conscientious and recycle it. No matter what the reason, you want to make sure all your data is cleaned off the drive.

Just deleting files isn't enough. You need wipe that hard drive clean to make sure that your data is completely gone. Eraser is a tool that can help you do just that. Not only does it "erase" your data, it actually overwrites it with other data in such a way that it's really, really gone. Now you can sleep better at night knowing that your personal information isn't going to fall into somebody else's hands.

Eraser is a free download. It's a Windows app and the latest version runs under XP and later; they've also got an older version that still works with Win98, ME, NT and 2000.

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You know the scenario: you're sitting there in front of your computer, not doing a thing, and all of a sudden the hard drive light starts furiously flashing on and off. Or you're doing some trivial task, like reading an email message that you have already downloaded to your machine, and all of a sudden your CPU usage peaks at 100% and stays there for what seems an eternity. Has your machine been possessed? Is your computer about to melt down? What's my computer doing?

As luck would have it, that may be the solution. What's My Computer Doing? is a tool that lets you know what's going on behind the scenes. When you bring it up, it shows all the programs currently running on your system, with details about who's reading and writing to and from the hard drive, and what's using up all your processor cycles. Newly armed with that information, you can decide whether it's all legit, or that maybe you'd like to kill that program. If you really want to calm things down, you've even got the option to uninstall a particularly troubling application.

What's My Computer Doing? is a free download. You can run it on Windows systems using WinNT/2000 and later.

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Back when dinosaurs roamed he earth and everybody had a big, clunky desktop computer, there were all kinds of little flashing indicator lights that told you when important things were happening with your system. There were lights for the NumLock and CapsLock keys; there was even a light or the ScrollLock key (whatever that is), as well as flashing lights to let you know that your hard drive was being accessed to read and write data. Now that everybody's got a laptop or a netbook, some of those goodies have gone away. It's still important to know what's happening with your system; that's where TrayStatus may come in handy.

This little app sits in the System Tray, keeping an eye on what's happening with your computer. When you press any of those keys, or when there is disk activity, TrayStatus takes note and lets you know what's up. For your hard drive, it'll even let you know how much is being read and written, something that old amber light on the front of the CPU could never hope to achieve.

TrayStatus is a free Windows application. It should work with just about everybody from Win2k (SP4) up to the present.

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