It catalogs all the files on a hard drive, and even makes thumbnail images of their contents that you can browse. ![]() The program sees all the hard drives attached to your computer, and allows you to choose which one(s) you want to index. It does everything WhereIsIt? could do, and more. I don’t know why I never came across it before, since the website indicates the program has been available since 2001. The one I am trying right now is called WinCatalog2019 ( ). Happily, there are some more recent efforts at file indexing available. I couldn’t keep playing with it to keep it functional, so I decided to hunt for something new. It hasn’t been updated since 2014, and recently I noticed it was not only slowing down and failing to complete index updates, it was even freezing and requiring a machine reboot. ( Unfortunately, the program is starting to show its age. Eventually, vendors produced similar Windows-based programs, and for the past 12 years, I’ve relied on a pretty good program called “WhereIsIt?” to index multiple external drives. Once Windows became widespread, MS-DOS programs like Magellan lost their usefulness. It even had “viewers” allowing you to peek inside the file without actually opening it in its native software. If you could remember a phrase or text string, Magellan would show you a list of the files that contained that text string. Magellan scanned your hard drive (back in the days when a really big hard drive might be 5-10 megabytes) and produced a searchable index. People who remember the dawn of the personal computer era may remember a Lotus Development Corp. That’s where file indexing and cataloguing software comes into the picture. ![]() This all works out fine if I can associate some file with a client, but if I’m looking for a file with a specific content or text sequence in the name, and can’t remember the client it was associated with, the system breaks down. ![]() If I produce video for the client, there is a client-named folder on one of the external hard drives I use for video or audio projects, and the individual projects have subfolders there. In each client folder there are subfolders, usually named for a year, and all the documents for that client for that year go into the appropriate folder. Every client has a folder named for the client. I am pretty compulsive about file and folder naming on my computer.
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