**Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Keeping track of changes to your important files is one of the basic Windows file management tasks that everyone should be able to do. But if you have a lot of files on your computer or have shared folders that other users can access, it can make it harder to manage these files. In this article, we will be showing you how to monitor hard drive or folder changes in real time with Disk Pulse.
The Disk Pulse app comes in various versions such as free, pro, server and enterprise. For most Windows users, the free version should work just fine unless you need some of the advanced features that the other versions offer. You can download Disk Pulse from their website here.
When you first begin the installation process, you may see a popup from Microsoft Defender SmartScreen saying it’s an unrecognized app. This message appears when you try to run an application that is either unrecognized or potentially unsafe, but you can simply click on More info and then the Run anyway button to get past it.
You will now see the Disk Pulse interface and can start adding drives or folders that you want to monitor.
If you click the Monitor button at the upper left side of the app, you can then add directories or folders to be monitored.
The Options section is where you can configure which types of changes you want to be monitored. You can also have it monitor files, directories or both.
The Events section will allow you to enable or disable specific types of changes such as file name, modifications and attribute changes.
Once you finish with the configuration settings, you can click on the Start button to monitor the drives or folders you have selected. The main monitor screen will show you the date, time, operation, size, owner and name of the files that were changed, added or deleted.
If you have too many options selected, you may notice that the monitor list will get filled with information you might not find useful.
If you click on the Wizard button, you can change what types of files are monitored to narrow things down. You can also go back to the previous profile settings and make adjustments there.
For example, if we change the monitor type to images, graphics and picture files and add the Pictures folder to our list, we can see what types of changes have been made to image files.
At the lower left of the Disk Pulse app, you can see summary statistics for various types of categories. You can change this view from the dropdown arrow button at the top of the list.
Next to that you can change the type of categories that are displayed for the monitoring process with the default being Categorize by change type.
At the top of the interface, you can click on the Charts button to see a graphical view of the changes to your files and folder.
If you want to fine tune the way Disk Pulse works, you can click on the Options button and make any changes that are needed.
The is also a button for Reports but this feature is reserved for the professional version of Disk Pulse.
You can however, click on the Save button to export a report in a variety of formats such as HTML, PDF, Excel and CSV.
For additional training resources, check out our online IT training courses.
Check out our extensive IT book series.
