Take shareable snapshots of a folder tree with Snap2HTML
If a friend asks you to help troubleshoot his or her PC problems then it’s often useful to check their hard drive to see exactly what’s installed and where. But if they don't live nearby, and there’s no convenient screen sharing or remote access technology to hand, then don’t worry: there’s always Snap2HTML.
Point this tiny program (a 185KB download) at any location on the hard drive, click "Create Snapshot", and it’ll quickly scan the system, recording any files or folders it contains in a ready-to-email (after zipping, at least), self-contained HTML report.
This isn’t just some static text list, though: it’s a dynamic page which looks and works much like a browser-based version of Explorer. There’s a left-hand pane containing your folders; clicking any folder shows you the files and folders it contains, along with their size and Last Modified date; you even get a basic search tool.
The end result is a surprisingly capable tool which has all kinds of applications. If you ever need to record the contents of a folder tree for easy analysis later -- and some variation on the "DIR C:\Somewhere /S > report.txt" theme really isn’t good enough -- then Snap2HTML will probably come in useful.
If this is sounding familiar, then you’re right, we covered the program back in November 2011. RL Vision has just released a new version, though, and it has two significant improvements.
Large files no longer take an age to load, for instance. We were able to take snapshots of a full hard drive containing many thousands of files, and could open and browse them with no performance issues at all.
In addition, the report file size has dropped by a third. Our largest snapshot was 17MB, so they’re still not exactly small (hardly a surprise, HTML wasn’t really designed with this task in mind), but if that creates an issue with emailing then zipping them up should reduce file size by a further 75 percent or so.
If you can use this kind of functionality, then, Snap2HTML will now deliver it better than ever. Give it a try.
Photo credit: S.john/Shutterstock