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App to Catalogue External Harddrives?

E

ehmjay

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 26, 2006
99
10
Hi there,

At our office we (much like everyone else) have literally terabytes of external harddrive space across sever external harddrive. The problem? No idea what is on them.

Now obviously we can open up finder and read the contents but that requires us getting the drive out, plugging it in, scrolling through it, etc. That's fine for the first go but two months down the line when we want to find something its less than ideal.

Is there a simple app for Mac OS X that allows you to catalogue the contents of your external harddrives? I had one back in my PowerPC days but it's long since fallen out of use.

Essentially I want to be able to have a catalogue of all of the drives which could be searched and in a pinch printed so that we can simply do a find operation for the file in question and immediately know "Oh, its on DRIVE XX".

If anyone knows of a solution it would be GREATLY appreciated.
 
Maybe there is an app for it but I would use Terminal. It is very simple, just use the find command.

When you are in a folder, type find . into Terminal in that folder to have a list like:

.
./.DS_Store
./Converted
./Converted/TheTrueConservatives Channel (1).mov
./Converted/videoplayback.mov
./TheTrueConservatives Channel (1).flv
./TheTrueConservatives Channel.flv
./videoplayback.flv

To put this into a text file, use the > command. For example type find . > example.txt for each drive.

If you want to get to your external, plug it in, open Terminal (in Applications, Utilities) and type cd /Volumes/name_of_your_drive.

You can then use a simple cmd + f command in TextEdit for example to find the file you are looking for. If you name each text file with the name of the drive it refers to, searching Finder for the file you are looking for in the drives will show a text file with the name of the drive you want.
 
adamtheturtle said:
Maybe there is an app for it but I would use Terminal. It is very simple, just use the find command.

When you are in a folder, type find . into Terminal in that folder to have a list like:

.
./.DS_Store
./Converted
./Converted/TheTrueConservatives Channel (1).mov
./Converted/videoplayback.mov
./TheTrueConservatives Channel (1).flv
./TheTrueConservatives Channel.flv
./videoplayback.flv

To put this into a text file, use the > command. For example type find . > example.txt for each drive.

If you want to get to your external, plug it in, open Terminal (in Applications, Utilities) and type cd /Volumes/name_of_your_drive.

You can then use a simple cmd + f command in TextEdit for example to find the file you are looking for. If you name each text file with the name of the drive it refers to, searching Finder for the file you are looking for in the drives will show a text file with the name of the drive you want.
Click to expand...

While this is certainly *A* solution I'm not sure it'd be the BEST solution. It seems like it would require a great deal more steps, especially since I'd have to go through and repeat each of these steps for every folder on every external drive. That would make for one VERY long text file. It's certainly an option but I think it's not quite what we had in mind (you have to understand these are 8tb raids with a LOT of data on them)


AmanO said:
There was an app called disktracker. I am not sure if it is still around but I loved it.

You could DnD any volume and it would catalog it all. You could save it to a searchable file.
Click to expand...

I believe Disk Tracker was the app I used to use. And apparently it still works in lion! Thanks for refreshing my memory!
 
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