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[ Go to July 1997 Table of Contents ]
WinLab Reviews
-- by Dave Johnson
Kiss Software's DoubleZip offers a combination of several utilities. The program can compress files on a removable disk while synchronizing data with your hard disk. However, DoubleZip is remarkable only in its ability to perform these actions simultaneously. Independent utilities in Windows 95 offer similar services for free. In DoubleZip's two-pane window, select which drives and directories you'd like to synchronize. You are able to exclude specific subdirectories from the list, but not individual files. Additionally, the program can be instructed to overwrite older versions of a file (regardless of location) or to overwrite files only from a particular drive. When synchronizing either multiple folders or different fixed drives to the same removable disk, each session can be assigned a name and can perform different synchronizations. Files can be compressed as they're synchronized. The Compress utility manually shrinks files without synchronization. Unfortunately, DoubleZip's compression mechanism isn't a real-time compress/decompress engine like Win95's DriveSpace. Instead, compressed files need to be expanded before using them; there must be sufficient space on a removable disk to hold the resulting decompressed files. DoubleZip provides a small decompression utility that can be shared with users who don't have the application installed. However, that's small comfort if you want to use compressed data directly from a disk that's already full. While there's no other single program like DoubleZip that can perform all the synchronization and compression tasks for your removable media, the Win95 Briefcase (see "On the Road with Windows 95," June 1996) and DriveSpace accomplish many of the same objectives.
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