[Macworld.com]

Wish to search the contents of an unmounted volume? CDFinder will find a way. [more]

[Nobody]

A quick and dirty method is to expand the window of the drive (when connected), show list view and take a screen snap of important views of the data. Label and store the screen snaps of all your drives in a folder on your Mac's harddrive. This is usually enough to nudge your memory when it comes to looking for the particular drive you want.
Oh and physically label the drive itself as well.
I have tested a lot of disk catalogers. I was drawn to CDFinder because it can read my old Disk Recall catalogs, although I have never managed to do so successfully. It reads them excruciatingly slowly and I never finished the conversion.
For me the greatest issue with Disk Catalogers is the enormous drop in speed since Apple switched to OSX. Disk Recall was lightning fast in OS9, grabbing the CD's desktop files and incorporating them into its data file almost instantly upon inserting the CD. Unfortunately as important as it is to have a program that will stick with you through all of Apple's drastic changes, there is no way of knowing which ones will give up on development. Disk Recall's developer briefly had a half hearted OSX version before giving up on it.
In OSX there is a long delay on mounting the CD and each of the catalogers takes a considerable time to analyse the disk. Multiply this over 100s of back-up CDs and the time wasted is enormous. Some of the better catalogers will auto eject the CDs but this is only a minor part of the problem.
Could readers please share their experience of catalogers.
Could MacWorld also give a complete comparative review of all of the catalogers. Issues I look for are speed, auto eject, the ability to alter the name of or add notes to badly named CDs or volumes, cross platform ability, ability to alter the view to simplify the list or to open in outline view, legibility and general attractiveness on screen, ability to search across multiple catalogs (don't put all your eggs in one basket), auto backup, and ofcourse sticking around.
Unfortunately once you choose you are usually stuck with the program because it is such a pain to recreate the collections.

[mistersquid]

Very recently one of your colleagues, Dan Frakes, provided an excellent review of two offline disc cataloging softwares.

Another favorite site of mine for Macintosh information management software reviews is About The Particular Macintosh, and they have an older head-to-head between CDFinder and Catalog in which CDFinder gets the nod.

[Chris Breen]

In reply to:

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Very recently one of your colleagues, Dan Frakes, provided an excellent review of two offline disc cataloging softwares.

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Yeah, I saw that. The fact that it works so slowly (15 hours for a FireWire drive with 85,000 files) and creates such large catalogs (735MB for that particular catalog) took it right out of the running. I wasn't about to recommend that sort of tool (free as it may be) to someone wanting to catalog 17 FireWire drives.

[Dan Frakes]

Touvaly uses an interesting approach, but as I noted in the article, it's not really suited for large hard drives with lots of files. It's great for CDs, DVDs, and other smaller media, though.

[Guntis]

I'd recommend FileFinder ($25, currently only PowerPC version). It's the fastest cataloging software for the Mac. It took 1 minute and 9 seconds to index my whole 80 GB hard drive! (some GBs are free, of course, that leaves about 52 GB of system and user files). You can also select option to index all Spotligh comments as well, in that case indexing is much slower. I think FileFinder is about 10-12 times faster than Catalog. There are also advanced search options, and you can perform search on all or just the selected offline volumes. Currently I've indexed my Applications and Home folder, 14 CD/DVD discs and 3 hard drives (80, 160 and 250 GB). And this index file currently is just 14MB. This program is really fast!

[Chris Breen]

You're right, FileFinder is fast. Its search criteria isn't as comprehensive as CDFinder -- it searches catalogs only for Name, Path, or Comment -- but some people may not need more expansive searching.

[Nobody]

Best ever: DiskTracker
http://www.disktracker.com
Easy, simple and powerful.

[exnihilo]

17 FW HDs? Isn't it better to invest in a RAID, copy the data and then sell the HDs on eBay? That way you'll just have one HD to catalog, or keep a couple for portability.

[Dan Frakes]

In reply to:

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Best ever: DiskTracker
http://www.disktracker.com

Easy, simple and powerful.

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We reviewed it back in October 2004:

http://www.macworld....nized/index.php