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With terabyte hard drives now costing somewhat less than refueling your car, disk space on the average PC has exploded--and it can be difficult to manipulate all those hundreds of thousands of files. FlexTK Express is a powerful tool for discovering just what's on your hard drive, and doing something about it.

FlexTK Express is not another Explorer substitute. Instead, it is a program which performs bulk analysis of files and directories, followed by operations on them. For example, suppose you have a directory with a mix of picture and movie files, in a variety of formats. You want the pictures moved to a separate directory, and the movies left behind, except for AVI formats. FlexTK lets you do this easily, and further lets you save this operation to be run at any time.

FlexTK operates by means of categories. The default breaks files down by type (Media, Document) and then by further and further sub-types. Other options available include Time and Size. This allows you, for example, to analyze a directory and see what percentage of the files are more than a year old, or how much of your disk space is consumed by a few bloated files.

Nothing much can be done in FlexTK until you have classified a directory, as it relies on classifications to do its job. Once this is done, you can use the Organize option to perform a variety of tasks, including copying, moving, and deleting files. Find every movie file in a huge disk and move them to cheap external drive? Not a problem. Locate duplicate files scattered all over your system and get a report on them, so that you can delete extraneous data? Easy.

The only hitch is that no work can be done until the directory or drive has been classified, and FlexTK does not alert the user that this is the case. It just happily processes nothing. Beyond this minor quirk, I found little to dislike in FlexTK Express. Because it is a powerful tool which does a lot to your files, user caution is recommended, especially when using the Delete function.

More powerful versions, the Professional and Ultimate versions, include data migration, command line tools, and the capacity to handle larger numbers of files.

--Ian Harac