What is the crowd's opinion of Cathy?

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EVERYTHING - A small, very fast replacement for windows file search. So fast, so NOT annoying or frustrating. Now, it does have a drawback in that it only searches on the filename - I believe the default Windows search can search within files. I guess that's why it's so slow for me.

CATHY, a tiny, fast file organizer. I have a ton of multimedia files on over 400 DVD's. When I create a new disc, I open this and catalog the files within (takes a second or so). From then on, when I want to locate a multimedia file, I run CATHY and enter a full or partial filename to find what disk it's on. I've been using it about 10 years.

AIMP 3 - A small, but full-featured audio file player. What WinAMP should have grown up to be. Also been using this for 10 years or more. No file cataloging, no built-in store. . .It has a tag editor and Audio Converter, but they're hidden away and you'll never see them unless you look for them. Tons of skins, with a WYSIWYG skin editor. I use my PC as my stereo, and this is perfect - full-featured enough to do what I want, but small, simple to use, and I've made my own skins so that it works exactly how I want it to! (Click on the "EN" on the upper right to get the English version of the page)

In that case, I would think your first priority would be to bring everything into a single enclosure.

But if you really want to stick with swapping out disks, try something like Cathy for cataloging/search (about 2/3 down this page)

There's a small portable program called Cathy that can do this.

Here's how to use:

1. Have your friend place the .exe in an empty folder, run it, click the Catalog tab, select a drive from the drop-down box and click Add.

2. A .caf file will be created in the same folder. Ask your friend to zip and email it to you.

3. On your computer, place the .caf file in the same folder as the .exe and run the .exe. Click the Catalog tab. You'll be able to browse the file structure in tree view.

There are a few free/cheap solutions, in order of difficulty:

1] Screenshots of the contents of every drive.
- cons: can't look at subfolders without mounting drive, no search.

2] use the command line or powershell(windows) to generate a txt or csv file of the contents of each drive, then import the data into an excel sheet or simple database (ms access, filemaker, etc.)
- cons: probably can't search anything but file name, may not show paths.

3] freeware, like 'cathy', which does limited volume catalogging.
- cons: need the index file and the software to look at the catalogs, has an item count limit per index. EDIT: is OAF.

asset management systems tend to require that all of you data live on network storage, and are exponentially more difficult and costly to setup than most small businesses want to invest in.

I use Cathy - http://www.mtg.sk/rva/ (scroll down to find it)

My use is for old HDDs here I store backups and archives but it'll do all drives. Recognises the serial-id, indexes very quickly, refreshes quickly, is very quick to search, stores catalogs in single files making them easy to back up in turn.

And it's free. Completely free.

Cathy (http://www.mtg.sk/rva/) might be worth a look for you. Lightweight, no need for installation and faster than anything else I have tried. Can also search for duplicate files based on filename and size.

I think you need something like Cathy. It scans drives incredibly quickly and creates a searchable database. I use it to keep track of over 300GB of music.

http://www.mtg.sk/rva/ (scroll down a bit)

Posted this before:

Cathy, free and easy, and a great search. Official site: http://www.mtg.sk/rva/ (just scroll down)

Best of all, portable with just a single .exe

You are able to see the full directory structure if your friend gets the program too, but also you can export to text file.

While I haven't used it personally, I have read really good things about Cathy and if I had a need for this, Cathy would be the first utility I would try. I included the link to SnapFiles instead of the authors website because it has some screenshots to give you a better idea of what to expect.