Ambrosia Software brought us Snapz Pro, one of the best (if not THE best) screenshot programs. With Dragster, Ambrosia has brought us the best way to move and copy files fast.

Dragster is a utility that lives in your menu bar and/or in your Dock. It can also be present in your contextual menus. There’s no manual to Dragster, nothing new to learn. It is enough that you know it is meant to move or copy files fast from one location to another. Locations can be any type of server, and your local system.

Working with Dragster is a matter of dragging a file to the Dragster icon in the Dock or selecting the Dragster option from the context menu. Dragster will show you 4 options to choose from: Local System, iDisk, Remote Server, and Send as Email.

The first time that you select an option, Dragster will allow you to save to the location you specify, using standard Finder dialogue windows, with a few extras. One of those extras is that you can save the location as a shortcut. Shortcuts are the centre of Dragster’s ease of use and speed.

Dragster Is Fast

Shortcuts can be set up so that you get to see the save location dialogue every time you drag a file. They can also be set up to nag you when a file would be overwritten. Or you can have Dragster shut up altogether and just drop the file where you want it, whatever the consequences.

When using Dragster to send a file to a local folder, the application will actually move the file. You can have it copy a file, but then you’ll have to hold the Option key. With FTP or other servers, the behaviour is exactly the opposite: Option-click to have the file disappear from your local system.

Dragster is clever: it knows FTP, SFTP, SCP, SMB (Windows File Sharing), as well as AFP (AppleShare). When sending a file via FTP, Dragster was averagely fast on my system, but not as fast as Transmit.

However, there’s a big “but” with that statement. When I compared the time it takes to open Transmit, get it to list the files in the directory where I want to drop the files and than actually start transmitting, Dragster wins by more than a nose length. In fact, Dragster even won when I compared it to Transmit’s droplet system, because that still must start the application before it can initialise the file transfer.

Sending files attached to an e-mail is also quite fast. Dragster will let you prefill addresses and a short message, which you can then save as shortcut. Of course, this only makes sense when you’re often sending attachments to the same people.

A couple of days ago, I reviewed PowerSWITCH. While PowerSWITCH can do a lot more than Dragster because it is a full-blown client/server workflow application, I found Dragster’s file transfer (local or remote) capabilities to be just as robust.

If you don’t need the workflow power of PowerSWITCH, but all you really want to do is move files faster, then you should definitely give Dragster a try. I think you’ll find it an invaluable time saver for a small fee (€16.00).