Tip #3739 - Flash Drive Manager
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Flash
Drive Manager
USB flash drives are
incredible devices, don't you agree?
On that one little
stick, you can hold as much information as a full-fledged hard drive could
hold less than five years ago! Now, everything is portable and it's so
convenient. (For more information, you can read this article).
But, are you using
it to its full capacity? Or as easily as it could be?
By using a small (and
free!) utility from Microsoft, you can vastly expand the flexibility of
your little USB drive. This program is called Flash Drive Manager.
Come check it out with me!
To get your copy of
Flash Drive Manager, head right here
to download it to your computer.
Once you have it downloaded,
click on the UFDSetupWizard.Msi file. Once you do that
though, you might be greeted with the following warning screen:
But, since you downloaded
it from Microsoft itself, there should be no problems in accepting the
software, so go ahead and click the Run button.
You will then be asked
where you want to install the program to. For this program, it's okay
to accept the default offered, unless you have a reason not to. If you
do, you can easily change the location.
Once installed, launch
the program and you will be greeted by this license agreement, which you
have to accept in order to proceed any further.
Thereafter, you will
be in the opening screen of the utility, which looks like this:
Across the top, you
will see a number of tabs, which I have numbered from one to six for your
convenience. I will now go through them and show you how useful they all
can be.
1.) Overview
This is the page you
are on now. You can navigate to the other pages by either clicking on
the relevant tab or the link with the green arrow that is underscored
in blue. But, please take note of the warning at the right, regarding
having the USB drive plugged in before commencing any actions.
2.) Copy Files
This enables you to
easily copy files to the USB drive. Let’s have a look at the screen:
Note:
It is important that you first highlight the USB drive you are using in
the left hand box (you can use the Manager to handle multiple USB drives
if you wish).
Next, click on Explore
in the bottom right hand corner. That will open a typical Explorer screen
for you like the one shown in the illustration above. Highlight the files
you want to copy over in the usual way and they will immediately be copied.
(There’s no need to click anything else, because it is almost instantaneous).
Pressing the Delete
button will do exactly what it says, but be careful. Make sure you check
the request for confirmation screen carefully so you don’t wipe
out everything on the drive!
3.) Back Up/Restore
The Flash Drive Manager
gives you the ability to back up whatever you have on your USB drive to
an image file on your hard drive for security purposes (to learn more
about using images for backups, read this article).
The process is quite
simple.
Check the “Back
up files from a Flash Drive to my computer” option (circled
above), make sure the right flash drive is highlighted in the left hand
box and then press Backup. That’s all there is
to it! (By default, it will save your data to a folder in your My Documents
folder, but you can change that by using the Settings
tab. I will explain more on that later in the article).
The process is the
reverse for restoring an image to the flash drive.
Select “Restore
files,” select the Image file on the hard
disk and then click Restore. If you want to clear all
the files existing on the flash drive first, just click the relevant box
(circled above).
Note:
The files will be restored to a folder created on the flash drive by the
Manager program, but you can move them wherever you want afterward, just
as you would do with any files.
4.) Properties
This will enable you
to do some tidying up and make a few changes. Look at this screen first:
Select the right USB
drive (if you have more than one) and click on Edit to
show this screen:
As you can see, you
can:
a.) Change the label
of the USB drive.
b.) Set the USB drive to AutoRun (which means it will run automatically
as soon as you plug it in to the computer, just like most CDs and DVDs
do).
c.) Include runtime components (basically, if your computer doesn’t
have the necessary files to enable AutoRun, this will make them available).
Don’t bother with this one unless you have a burning need for the
AutoRun option and it doesn’t work!
Complete the relevant
field and click Save to process them.
5.) Manage
Library
Here's the screen:
This enables you to
work with the various drive images you have on your hard drive, but also
to make some modifications to the USB drive, similar to what you have
done with the Properties (above).
But, you have the
addition of the Delete tab (use with caution, see above) and Explore to
locate the files to work with on your hard drive.
6.) Settings
As this screenshot
shows, there are a number of things you can do here:
Let’s ignore
the Wireless Network Setup Wizard for a moment and look at the Settings
box below.
In order, you have:
a.) Include
runtime components: We already discussed this under Properties.
b.) Free disk space: Enables you to say the smallest
amount of free space you want to use for the backup. If you haven’t
got enough, the backup will not run.
c.) USB backup library location: If you don’t want
to save the backup in the default location (My Documents), you can change
it here.
So, there you have
it. A neat and free utility from Microsoft that will help you manage all
of your USB flash drives. You gotta love it!
~ David Woodford
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