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print-to-file or printer the contents of hard drive
I have a shelf of hard drives as archives of projects that may come back to life for updates. I’d like to be able to create a text file or spreadsheet listing the contents of a drive, before taking each one offline. It would be especially cool if I could search across the contents of many offline drives. Could someone recommend a utility? Thanks!
— Bob C
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6 Replies
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Hi
CatDV
https://www.squarebox.co.uk/ -
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Thanks, guys. Those programs look great — I assume what you’re talking about is that they can give you visual icons for image assets.
What I have in mind is much simpler, I think — just a list of the filenames and folders on the hard drives on my shelf — searchable so I can rapidly retrieve something from a project, or so that I can reload a project for more editing.
— Bob C
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You can build a list of what’s on a disk with automator, and then put it into a database or into Excel or wherever you want.
The first step in the workflow would be new workflow, then library ” finder”, and action “get specified finder items.” Check the box which says “show action when run”.
The next step would be finder, show folder contents. Check the box which says “repeat for each subfolder found.”
The last step would be text edit, new text file.
When you run, the automator workflow will stop for you to pick a hard drive (click the + sign, and select the drive), then when you select “continue” to accept that selection, then it will list the contents of that drive to a text edit document.
You can import this into Excel, and select delimited, and select “/” as the delimiter, and the info will be separated into columns by heirarchy.
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Thanks for all of the advice. CDFinder is terrific. I’ve already cataloged three hard drives from my archives shelf.
I found a use for it about two hours after installing it, when I opened an old FCP project that had three files missing. CDFinder told me exactly which offline drive they were in, and which folder.
With 300 GB hard drives costing about $100, and software like this to organize the results, archiving is going to be a lot simpler, and much more rewarding.
— Bob C
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