Fireworks, parades, unicorns made of ice cream, pleasant leprechauns doing amusing jigs; these things are fun. Backing up files is not. If you disagree with this you may be a loser. Check that, you are a loser. Or a network admin. Wait, that should read AND a network admin. Boring network geeks aside, backing up files is important. Much like prostate exams. Important, but painful. If you're not backing up files at home, here's a free tool that you can use to get on board the fun bus.

AutoVer is about as straight forward as it gets. Easy to install and use, and does everything you'll need it to do. Plus some advanced features sure to keep the die-hards interested, such as version controlling. It's obviously not really something you'd want to use in a large scale work environment, but if you're to forgetful/lazy/narcoleptic to manually back up files on your home computer, it's worth a look at. Once you have it set up, it runs pretty well on it's own, and handles errors smoothly. It doesn't explode if your back up drive fails, or any of that fun stuff, and works with flash drives and the like. And the price is perfect. Mmmmfree.

There are a lot of file sharing/hosting/storing sites out there. A lot. So one of my first predictable questions for DivShare co-founder David Altschul was of course, "Why use DivShare?" His answer: "DivShare sets itself apart from other free file hosts in a number of distinct ways, most notably in that we offer unlimited uploads and downloads, no waiting lines for files, auto image galleries, no popups or spam, an intuitive member dashboard, and all files stay online forever. Perhaps the biggest reason why bloggers and webmasters should choose DivShare over the other free file hosts is our co-branding options. Blogs can quickly and easily add their name, URL and logo to their hosted file pages via the dashboard. An example of co-branding can be seen here (warning: the link may also start a download - you can cancel it - but it's actually a pretty good song).

I have to admit, everything David says sounds great (files stay online forever?!). But how does it actually perform? Well, the aforementioned song downloaded at an average rate of 550KBps, which isn't bad at all. I uploaded a 10MB video, and though there's no fancy Flash-Ajax upload timer, it took less than 2 minutes to complete. On an upstream-weak cable connection, that's pretty darn good. Since DivShare launched this month, only time will tell if the service remains as excellent as it is right now. Happy uploading!

P.S. You can't upload files larger than 100MB.

Files-Upload will let you upload up to a 1GB file unlimited times and unlimited storage on their site, and you can do it using your favorite FTP program. The catch here is that your files will only be retained for 6 months since the last download of that file. If you don't feel like downloading files every six months, you will lose files. Files-Upload offers a free subdomain "myname.files-upload.com" for easy access to those files. There is also a web interface to upload files if you want, but hey who wouldn't want to use FTP for most things? Either way, and even with the 6 month half-life of your files, FREE is a hard price to beat to only have to do a re-download every 6 months to keep them alive. Worth it, don't you think?

This from the Freaky-drop-the-remote-and-go-hide-your-files department. An anonymous source sent us Gegereka (which sounds like the name of a Grecian god of FTP server indexing or file nakedness) is a new FTP server search engine and indexer. You can search for .mp3, .wav, .jpg, .gif, .avi, .mpg, .zip, .rar, .gz, .exe, .doc, .txt, .pdf, .xls, .ppt and just about any other type you can think of. I tried both psd and wmv formats, of which it found many (screenshots after the jump). Gegereka looks oddly like Google, but so does everything these days. The scary thing is Gegereka finds files on FTP servers, and the owner of the server may not even have a clue that their files are being scanned. This is a cool idea for a web application, and I like the "search within results" feature as well, but I can see this tool being sorely misused by the RIAA and others like them. Katie, bar the freakin' door.

Zapr lets you create links to files on your PC, and then send them out to friends and contacts via email or IM. These links that are sent are a direct conduit to your computer. The recipient of the link can then view the files directly in their browser.

Sharing folders with friends and contacts sounds pretty simple. Simply drag and drop your folder into Zapr. Zapr then creates a special link you can send out to friends. Zapr file links are made by setting up your friends contact info, and dragging the file onto Zapr, which spits out a special link that your friend can open and view in a browser. The specific file is then downloaded through the browser window, with no file size or attachment restrictions. There is only one drawback. It's currently for users on Windows XP only. Zapr is currently in beta, and it's free to sign up.

So yesterday we made a big deal about AOL's announcement that beginning in September it would be offering 5GB of free online storage for everyone through its Xdrive service, but as savvy Download Squad readers know, Xdrive isn't the only game in town. Not by a long shot. In fact, it turns out that Listible has a list of 90 Online File Storage Services. Of course, there's a lot of variety among these services' offerings and limitations, but most of them have some level of free service. If you're looking for a place to dump some files online and can't wait til September for Xdrive, or if it doesn't meet your needs, you're quite likely to find what you're looking for at Listible.

[Via lifehack.org]

Ars Technica is reporting that versioning support will be implemented in Vista at the file system level, allowing users who have System Protection (enabled by default) running to simply right-click a file to access a "Previous Versions" menu (now I know why Vista's hard drive requirements are so steep). Previous Versions will also monitor backups made of files with Vista-aware backup applications, so it will only show versions of the file made after the last backup.

As usual, there could easily be privacy and security concerns among the corporate IT crowd, as Previous Versions can make copies and track versions of files on network drives as well. As icing on the cake, the term 'deleted file' might also become a thing of the past, as Previous Versions can restore files even after being removed from the recycle bin.

Check out Ars Technica's full writeup of everything Previous Versions will have to offer.

Filelight is a Linux utility that creates a concentric graph of your computer's disk usage. Each color represents a different type of file, such as documents or apps, so it's easy to tell which is the biggest bully on the block. I found a utility like this for Mac OS X over on TUAW by the name of Disk Inventory X - has anyone seen a similar app for Windows?

No specific OS flavor is required, though Qt 3.2 and KDE 3.2 are. Filelight is available from MethyBlue and is released under the GNU General Public License.

Should we really trust a guy named Jackass JoeJoe? Well I did, and was amply rewarded. Anyone working with digital media assets for one reason or another winds up with gaggles of files. Renaming those, or changing anything en masse is a total chore. Thus, we have a slew of renaming utilities out there. I tried Rename Master, which is totally free (Windows only), and loved it.

Version 2.5 was just released and fixes a few bugs, but more importantly gets thumbnails working properly. Rename Master has a nice number of features but excels in ease of use as well. A nice balancing act. You can change metadata in MP3's or change names based on properties. Lots of nice little touches that all make sense. The source code is even available upon request. See a swanky movie of it in action here. Tell 'em Dingus McMoeMoe sent ya.