Photographers, video editors, and anyone who has been backing things up for a decade end up with a shelf of drives. Each one holds a few years of work. None of them is labelled well enough. The files you want are always on the disk that is not currently connected.
The old solution was to keep a notebook, or a text file, listing roughly what was on each disk. That falls apart the moment the contents change. The better solution is to catalog each drive and keep the catalogs together, so you can search across all of them at once.
Why a catalog beats plugging drives in
A catalog is a saved record of every file on a drive: names, paths, sizes, dates, and whatever metadata you captured. Once it exists, you no longer need the drive to answer questions about it. You can ask "which disk has the 2019 Barcelona shoot" and get an answer without touching any hardware.
That matters for a few reasons beyond convenience:
- Spinning up an old drive to browse it wears the drive. Reading a catalog does not.
- You can search all your drives at once, instead of one at a time.
- You keep a record even if a drive later fails, so you at least know what was lost.
The habit: scan on the way out
The trick is to make the scan part of putting a drive away, not a separate task you will never get around to. The flow looks like this:
- You finish working with a drive and you are about to disconnect it.
- Open FileLister, scan the drive, and save the catalog with the drive's name.
- Eject the drive and put it on the shelf.
Now the catalog lives on your Mac. The drive can be anywhere. When you rescan the same drive later, a Smart Collection can refresh automatically so the record stays current instead of going stale.
What to capture
For an archive drive, capture more rather than less. You are not going to rescan it often, so get everything useful in the first pass:
- Full paths so you know exactly where a file lives on the disk.
- Dates and sizes for sorting and for spotting the big items.
- Image and video metadata if the drive holds media, so you can search by camera, dimensions, or duration.
- Checksums if the drive is a backup you may need to verify against another copy later.
Export the catalog to CSV or JSON as well as keeping it in the app. A plain export is a safety net: even years from now, on any computer, a CSV of your drive contents opens in anything.
Finding a file later
When you need something, you search the catalogs, not the drives. The result tells you which disk the file is on and where it sits. Then you plug in that one drive, go straight to the path, and you are done. No hunting, no plugging in four disks to check.
This is one of those habits that feels like overkill until the first time it saves you twenty minutes. After that you catalog every drive on the way to the shelf without thinking about it.