Archifiltre

Archifiltre is a program meant to help you become more organized by sorting your directories' contents a lot more easily, based on a knowledgeable judgment about their size, file type, and their exact level of distribution in the filesystem.

Archifiltre is an open-source, free program. It was designed by a team of developers under the aegis of a governmental institution. The tool was built using mainly TypeScript and very little JavaScript. The Electron app is semi-portable and does not need to be installed. It can easily be accessed from the executable. Archifiltre will save and export the data it generates in the folder where it was placed.

Archifiltre can also restore a previous session's data every time you open a new instance of the program. In order to accurately use the tool, you must know what to expect. Drag and drop a folder in the main panel and you will see a tree representation of each directory and the other files it contains. You can display the data by size or count and sort it by date or type.

Besides sorting and displaying the information based on chosen criteria, you can also create detailed reports and export them. A bug/not-so-well-thought aspect is the fact that the main audit report (which gives very detailed and granular information about the content of your directories) will be in French, despite having selected English as the main language. If you are familiar with French, then it's your lucky day.

You can also export the data in a CSV format (with or without hashes); another type of report you can generate is the one containing the files' metadata encoding (the METS beta function). Moreover, Archifiltre will allow you to export a script that you can run directly on your server/other machines. The generated file will contain the following data: the absolute path, from the system, of the exported folder and of every file it contains, on what OS the export was run, the MD5 hash of every file in the exported folder, plus information about files' size, usage, and past modifications.

The answer is 'Yes'. The program can turn out to be quite useful. Given the fact that auditing your files and internal directories can be quite difficult, especially in the lack of Windows native, proficient apps, Archifiltre is clearly a good alternative. Although there is a minor discrepancy/malfunction that exports one of the audits in French, you can still get plenty of insights about your files and data distribution.