Suppose you have 10 shared folders that you use to share files between your home computers. Now, obviously, as the number is big enough, you may forget the activities in those shared folders. On the other hand, Windows doesn’t provide an option to track all activities in any folder. This is where TheFolderSpy comes in.
The Folder Spy works something like the feature of Google Drive that shows each and every activity done by users. This tool will notify you if any files in a monitored folder are edited, added or deleted. This portable software is tiny, yet very useful and shows all the activities in real-time. It is also possible to get a log file of any folder so that users can check the changes later.
TheFolderSpy folder monitoring tool
To use TheFolderSpy to track all changes in a folder, download it at first. After that, unzip and open it. Following that, you need to click on the Add Item button to select folder so that it can start tracking.
After that, you will get a screen that looks something like the following picture:
You now have to add the folder path (select folder).
Track, detect or monitor changes in Folder
Make sure that the Monitor sub-folders option is ticked. Otherwise, you won’t get a good result.
Generally, FolderSpy tracks the whole folder. But, if you wish to track particular types of files inside a folder, just select the extension. For instance, if you want to track all TEXT files, just enter .txt or if you want to track Word files, you need to enter .docx and so forth. You can include as many types of files as you want using this option.
There is another useful option that will let you exclude a particular file to be tracked. After doing everything, just hit the DONE button.
After settings up everything, you will start seeing all the changes like this:
Sometime, you will get “Deleted” text even when you have not deleted anything from that folder. This happens because TheFolderSpy shows “Cut” as “Delete”. That means, whenever you will cut any file or folder from that selected folder, you will get “Deleted” notification in TheFolderSpy window.
If you like, you can download TheFolderSpy from here.
