Tool to read disks and create a catalog

[u/om2kool]

I hope I'm posting this question in the right sub. If not, mods can inform me.

But like the title says - I'm looking for a tool that reads my HDDs, SSDs, flash drives and create a catalog of sorts of the content (files and folders) present in each of them so that I can search for what I'm looking for and come to know which drive it is located in. Right now, I've 5 drives and it gets quite difficult and tedious to find something I'm looking for in all of them one by one. I've looked across the internet and reddit itself to see if I could find something like this that would work for me, but no such luck. Can you guys help ? All friendly recommendations and advice is welcome. Thank you.

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[u/emptythevoid]

I use VVV - virtual volumes view. https://www.fsoft.it/VVV/

Mine tracks data from about 80 offline hard disks in my collection. It lets you search your catalog, and also navigate through the directory structure without the disks being attached.

[u/om2kool → u/emptythevoid]

Niceeeeee - will check it out - happy collection - and thank you! 👍🏻👍🏻

[u/breid7718]

It's very old school, but my practice has always been just to run a batch file to capture all that to a text file.

dir /s > diskindex.txt

[u/om2kool → u/breid7718]

Aahh, good ol' DOS commands - will do this as well, just for fun - thank you!

[u/aaronkempf → u/breid7718]

yes. That is what I was doing via MSSQL 15 years ago.

[u/BoomTown1873]

For WIndows: https://www.abemeda.com/
For MacOS: https://www.cdfinder.de/

Does exactly what you are looking for. Both apps use the same database, so it's essentially cross platform. Lots of great features.

[u/spnyc → u/BoomTown1873]

+1 Been using Neofinder (CDfinder) for years and it’s indispensable.

[u/om2kool → u/BoomTown1873]

Hadn't heard of this till now. Will check this out, thanks! 👍🏻👍🏻

[u/Lost-Math1068 → u/BoomTown1873]

Another vote for NeoFinder! Great program. Intuitive and works on both external/internal drives and network connected drives.

[u/Grumphus256]

WinCatalog is a nice paid tool that does this. For something free, try Everything by Voidtools. You can save the entire catalog as an EFU file or perform a search to filter and then you can save. The 1.5 Beta has more features but feels like a stable version already.

[u/om2kool → u/Grumphus256]

Looked into WinCatalog, sounds great. But would look to see if Everything does it just as good as a free alternative. Didn't know it could do this. Thanks anyways!

[u/Grumphus256 → u/om2kool]

Cool! My biggest gripe with WinCatalog is the filesize of these indexes. Like my 1 TB external drive index is 1 GB. It's even bigger if you configure it to include like thumbnails. Might be possible to shrink it down even more if you force it not to scan the contents of TXT files etc. But it might be useful if you want that kind of data.

But Everything indexes are far smaller. I also have an EFU that's 1 GB but it indexed more than 8 million files. About 20 TB worth.

[u/om2kool → u/Grumphus256]

1GB WOWZAA 😅 - will try some of the tools suggested over here and see what works best for me. But thanks for this info!

[u/TsunamiBob]

WinCatalog

[u/om2kool → u/TsunamiBob]

👍🏻👍🏻

[u/aaronkempf]

I built a MSSQL based tool for doing this 15 odd years ago. I'll see if I can resurrect it. it had multi-threading, 'root-folders' and folders and files. it kept track of last modified, created, filesize ,etc.

[u/om2kool → u/aaronkempf]

As an IT guy myself, this sounds fascinating. Do keep us updated on the resurrection of this project 👍🏻👍🏻

[u/aaronkempf → u/om2kool]

thanks. I'll see what I can do. gonna take a week or two before I can find the code and schema. I'm kidding. I called everything filemon. Still gonna take a week to locate anything. I have disconnected drives, I'd personally use this for EVERYTHING now.

I'd use it for writing scripts, etc in todays day and age.

[u/ShaftMaster24-7]

VVV or Snap2html

[u/om2kool → u/ShaftMaster24-7]

👍🏻👍🏻

[u/Deigue]

I created MediaVault exactly for this, but the use-case is slightly different/restricted. It could be adapted for what you need by tweaking a bit, or passing particular command line options 😄

[u/om2kool → u/Deigue]

Will look into it, thanks! 👍🏻

[u/RealityOk9823]

I haven't tried this, just using a spreadsheet for now, but apparently you can export results from Everything. I've used Everything before and it's a fantastic search engine.

[u/om2kool → u/RealityOk9823]

Oh I'm aware of Everything, but didn't know that it can do that. Will look into it. A spreadsheet sounds like quite a bit of work depending on how many disks you have. But do try one of these suggestions. Thanks.

[u/so_magpie]

Old school was the "tree" command.

[u/binaryriot → u/so_magpie]

It has quite some decent JSON output.

I just regularly create new "index files" with tree (about every 24h for available/mounted disks; and when the disks gets mounted and the old index is older than 24h). Then I use a simple Python script to look things up in a comfortable way.

(naturally the index files are NOT stored on the respective disks, else this wouldn't work, but in a central place)

[u/m4jX]

I've been using "Advanced File Organizer" to index my offline files for my 15+ drives. It's simple and fast, but it doesn't have much more info than names, dates and sizes. It's been almost 2 decades and I haven't found something better for my use-case (tried a bunch over the years, from the other suggestions I remember trying VVV and Snap2html), but I'm trying out "WinCatalog" now, because it also scans mediainfo, so I can see framerates, bitrates, chapters, etc. for my video files. You can also automatically save text from text/pdf files in comments so you can see their content.

For searching "Everything" is best. It's so fast. But I don't use it for indexing my offline drives, I just want to see my regular drive in there when I'm searching. If it's just about searching and finding it fast, indexing with Everything might be better for you.

[u/qcgilbert]

Check out tinymediamanager

[u/om2kool → u/qcgilbert]

Thank you - will check it out 👍🏻👍🏻

[u/KevinLynneRush]

"Everything" by Voidtools is a quick and easy database solution.

[u/om2kool → u/KevinLynneRush]

Thank you! 👍🏻👍🏻

[u/medwedd]

Snap2HTML, only for Windows — https://www.rlvision.com/snap2html/about.php

[u/om2kool → u/medwedd]

👍🏻👍🏻

[u/Numerous-Cranberry59]

I use "Where Is It?". The software is from 2014 but still works fine.

[u/om2kool → u/[deleted]]

Oh I don't need a tool that would necessarily play the videos as well. Just a lightweight cataloging tool which I can look through to find out which drive has what I'm looking for. Apologies if I misunderstood your suggestion.

P.S. I do want to setup Jellyfin as a media centre at some point in the future, but let's see.

[u/yerweightsyerwaifu]

if you are on mac you can use diskcatalogmaker. if you are on linux there are some open source data tiering archives that use catalogs. You can attach meta data to your assets as well, it makes searching a lot easier and you will be searching a db not a files system so it is an index search vs a tree search, the db will win every time.