15-Minute Reviews :: 10-Strike Network File Search v1.3

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is 10-Strike Network File Search version 1.3 by “10-Strike Software”: – A file-scanning utility for scanning network shares and FTP servers for file lists which then can be searched or printed.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Search files on network computers’ shared resources and FTP servers. Search documents on a corporate file server or look up new photos and multimedia files on your neighbours’ computers. The preview feature allows you to filter out the unnecessary information. Enter a search phrase or file masks and find the files you need.

10-Strike Network File Search scans shared resources and FTP servers using multithreading technology, this helps significantly decrease the time of searching. The program can look up network computers in Microsoft Windows Network or scan set of IP addresses or IP address ranges. 10-Strike Network File Search allows viewing search results and opening found files directly from remote computers. The program can generate and save handy HTML reports.”

Quick Pros

• Very fast network share and FTP scanning
• Filters for while scanning allows you to scan for specifics
• Ability to export results to HTML or TXT handy
• Built-in file downloader for FTP
• File preview capability with a range of file support

Quick Cons

• Export should be able to output to at least a CSV
• FTP does not support domain name or secure FTP
• Find functionality not very strong

Expansion

With network storage growing exponentially and with it coming an exponential growth of file storage, managing these files are becoming more and more difficult with time. This application attempts to help with finding files on various network locations.

This application is easy to get set up and rolling. The settings pages has most of the scanning options you’ll need to set up; For network scanning you set up IP range or network neighborhood scanning; For FTP scanning you set up a list of IP ranges to scan or a single IP with login information. As well, on the settings pages there are a set of filters as well to help speed scanning by denying scanning on a domain, computer or for a specific resource. There are other settings here too as well for previewing and network detection.

With my first network scan I scanned my entire network. It was able to scan the computer it was scanning as well as my network server. In a matter of seconds it retrieved 65,000 files’ information from both the computer hosting the scan and my server including name, domain (if any), directory, size and date (Assuming last modified?) I was rather surprised at how fast this went; A matter of seconds to do this scan.

A good feature to help you narrow down your scan, especially if you are only looking for something specific are the filters. There is a file mask box (Which can have multiple masks at the same time), as well as size and date filters as well to help your search. This could be used to find loose mp3s outside your collection, or all the videos on the network, or recently-updated files on your network.

The ability to save the reports into a text or HTML file is very handy, not only for future reference to be able to read (or search) at a later time but other uses could be found. I do wish the option to export to a CSV file would be available – It would be handy to be able to scan the network and have it imported into a database for even more aggressive searches, indexing of changed files and so forth.

As mentioned above, the application has the ability to scan FTP servers as well. With this said, its usefulness to many may be limited due to the fact that it does not support any form of secure FTP directly (You could still do FTP on SSH through PuTty I’m sure). It is never a safe idea do have a password flying on a network unencrypted out in the open for those to see to see freely and abuse. That said, this would be handy to scan an anonymous FTP server and identify what files are on it. The FTP scan also supports the ability to scan IP ranges as well, though likely less useful to most. Also built-in, is the ability to download file(s) directly within this application without having to fire up an FTP client.

One other note on this application is the supplimental Find ability. While it does have the ability to search file name, directory or domain with one search term at the same time, it does not have the ability for a more-advanced search by being able to search for items that contain a filename on a specific directory (Multiple entry boxes; One for each box.) It also does not have the ability to search further into the size/date combination either, which would have been handy for further refining your results without having to rescan a network (Which could still end up a lengthy job on a larger network.)

Final Verdict

This application searches networks and searched them fast for files. I was rather impressed at the scanning speed I saw come off this application. That said, I feel that while the capabilities are there, the features to ride on the scanning data need to improve; While there are many uses for this application, it really needs to expand its functionality so it can become a great tool. While free, if you need to search your network frequently for some reason or build reports on the files, this application may be for you. As for paying $24.95, if you have a genuine use for this application outside a one- or two-time use scenario, I feel it may be worth it, even though it does feel a bit weak in the features.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, July 13, 2007