Creating a catalog of external drives with Dopus

Help & Support
1

Hi.
I've got a few dozen external drives that I'd like to catalog in such a way, so that I can search for their contents using the fine search app Everything.

Now I'm halfway there with the following button: Copy FILTER="Folders Only", which lets me copy all the folders and subfolders of my Video X drive into a Video X folder in my dropbox, but I still have to manually create shortcuts to all the files themselves, by alt-dragging them into the appropriate "ghost catalog" folder in my Dropbox.

Obviously I'm looking for a way to automate the shortcut creation of all files within their respective "ghost" folders.
And a way to filter certain file types, lest my catalog get filled up with shortcuts of .dll or .nfo files.

How to do that in my same button?

Or any better ideas? (using DOpus only... the object is to be able to find records of all my external files using Everything).

Or...maybe we could get a cataloger built-into DOpus in the future!

Thanks!

2

What are all these shortcuts in your dropbox for? Is it just to be able to search for something on a different computer?

So what about a dead simple "DIR /S >..\dropbox\path\ExternalDrive01.txt" and just search these textfiles from now on? o)

3

The object is to use Everything to search for absent files (hence the shortcuts).

I did have a text-based catalog going for a few hours, and looked for a way to get Everything to search those text files, but couldn't find a plugin.

If you know of a way to make that happen, I'll go with that plan!

I would have to have one text file per drive though. Some of these drives are packed to the gills with clipart, fonts, etc...
So we're talking 20-30 text files, and it would be no fun to have to remember which one to open, before then hitting cmd-F to search them by hand.

4

In case you always have DO at hand, you could create a button to search all of these text files at once I guess.
But Everything seems to have support for file listings of external storage, maybe you look into it again, I found this description
on this website voidtools.com/support/everyt ... everything:

[quote]File lists
Create a snap shot of files on a NAS, CD, DVD or BluRay and include them in your index.
To show the built in file list editor, from the Tools menu, click File List Editor....
See File Lists for more information.[/quote]

5

Thanks. That indeed looked hopeful.

I scanned a few of my external drives with that, and it became too complicated.
Juggling databases to try and get Everything to read them...
Storing them in the right place...
Never got it to work.

Some search windows search ONLY my, other search windows find ONLY the present files...
So back to square one.