help me index my backup media

January 1, 2007 10:36 AM

Is there a smart way of indexing/cataloging my offline media? This has been partially asked before (I can't work out how to establish a link in here) - but the links that were in the post (diskbase), were mostly dead (and I didn't like 'Cathy' much). There is of course more inside.

I have 40 or 50 DVD's which serve as my backup media - full of a variety of files (mostly MP3s, videos and pictures) - I'd like to be able to put each one of these into my drive and for some software to index the files and make a searchable list of them.

I'm using a PC and I don't want to bring them back to 'online' media (hard drive etc) if possible to do this. I don't access the files often - but particularly for music I'd love to be able to search and find 'offline' files as well.

I don't need to index the text inside documents - most of my filenaming is pretty good.

Bonus points if the application that can do this is a) free and b) cool.

posted by mattr to computers & internet (4 comments total)

" I don't want to bring them back to 'online' media (hard drive etc)"

How long have you thought about that prohibition? I got tired of searching through my archival rack and bought a 500GB external drive. Made my life much much easier and the remaining capacity of the drive is cheaper than the same capacity in DVD-Rs.
posted by nathan_teske at 10:45 AM on January 1, 2007

I use Disclib for this exact purpose. Free and will search your catalog.
posted by smackfu at 11:02 AM on January 1, 2007

On linux I've heard of a method where basically you do a find on the root of the freshly burnt disk (that lists all the files) and save that off into a text file named with how you labeled the disk. Then you have an index of every file on your live computer, and you can just search the text files for what you need (via grep or similar). If you want to do that, look at gnuwin32, which are windows ports of the simple unix tools. This is an extremely lightweight way of handling lots of disks with lots of files.
posted by cschneid at 12:49 PM on January 1, 2007

For making a link in comments or posts on Metafilter, use standard HTML tags. It's covered in the FAQ.

For your question, you might want to try WhereIsIt.
posted by Rhomboid at 8:30 PM on January 1, 2007