Essential Software: Keeping track of the contents of all of your data CD and DVDs
Note: this post has been imported and re-editing from a personal blog. Time-sensitive material may no longer be relevant.
Since my preferred backup method is to archive all of my content to DVD, I have found myself with a very large collection of very full DVDs. To be honest, the problem started a long time ago, when I found that when I needed a particular file I had to go through each disc. It started out as a routine task. Then, as my backup CD collection grew, it became an annoying chore. Then, as the collection grew again and they were now full DVDs instead of full CDs, it became a bone fide problem.
What I really needed was an application that would save the directory structure — all the file names, dates, locations, etc. — of all of my discs. Something that I could search through even when the disc wasn’t in the drive. And I needed something that let me determine which copy is the most recent of any particular file. If you need similar software, read on — I found a couple of good ones!
In looking for this software, a significant problem turned out to be figuring out what search terms to use. Searching for “CD Catalog” and “Media Library” gave me the best results, although it was still difficult to find what I was looking for among the results, because these are also generic terms and not specific to software. I also tried searching for “disc cataloger”, “cd archiver”, “disc directory structure”, “directory snapshot”, “cd directory save”, “cd archive utility”, etc.
(And just so you know, I’m not writing out all of my search terms because I think it’s interesting. But hopefully this page will get indexed by search engines and people searching for similar software and having similar problems with too-generic search terms will run across this page and find what they’re looking for. That’s the plan.)
Much of what I found didn’t meet my specifications. Primarily, I would rather have a freeware application — open source if possible. I had toyed with the idea of writing my own software, using Python with a SQLite engine. (And I still might one day get around to this) But in the end this because too frustrating and I was running out of time before my deadlines drew me away. So I kept looking.
I did eventually find a couple of applications that I liked. One, Media Library, is open source; the other, DiscLib, is closed source but still freeware. They’re both good.
MediaLibrary is written in Java, so it’s also cross-platform — a big plus for some people. But the file search is limited to 200 search results — and if more results than that are found, it doesn’t show anything! This would be good for smaller needs, but the very first project I tried to search for resulted in too many files. A bad impression, right out of the box…. (so to speak) Plus, it uses the old-style Java GUI, which I’m not a big fan of. I’m sorry to say it, but if I’m running Windows, I want my programs to have a Windows GUI. The newest Java applications have the option of a Windows themed GUI, so hopefully Media Library just needs to get updated. Of course it is open source, so theoretically I could do it myself. But, there were always those I had fast-approaching deadlines to consider.
So I settled on DiscLib. I found it to be very easy to use, and aside from two small gripes is absolutely perfect for my needs. It has a very responsive Windows GUI, and it easy to use. There are no search limits, either.
My first gripe is that it doesn’t seem to be optimized as well as it could be. When I load it, it reads all of the data for my saved discs into the interface all at once, even though I have all of my discs collapsed and am not viewing any of this information at the time. The end result is a very slow loading process. I have tens of, maybe even hundreds of thousands of files that are stored in my backup discs. That takes a long time to load. Surely this could be updated at some point…. (hint, hint!) But don’t get me wrong, I’m not dissatisfied with this software because of this, it’s simply an area which could stand some improvement. I don’t need to access my backup files too often, waiting an extra two minutes a couple of times a month won’t kill me.
My other gripe is even smaller. I would like the ability to filter my file searches to pertain only to directories. This would help me locate my projects much easier, because I already had them sorted by directory. And I wouldn’t have to filter through hundreds of search results if all I’m interested in are a handful of directories. No biggie — again, this isn’t something I’m going to be doing very often, but it would be nice to see this addressed in the future.
If you are needing to organize your backups, either of these choices are great. But if you have a lot of material, and especially if you don’t require a cross-platform option, I suggest DiscLib.
January 25th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Another time saver you’ve given me… I hadn’t even thought about doing anything like this… just last night I was looking for something on one of my many DVD backups, and found it eventually on the last one that I was going to try! This will save some time.