How do I catalog files on several external hard drives that I want to store off-line?

My favorite is by far Cathy! It's very fast! works superbly, creates small compact catalogs. Its only 59KB in size. I bet you can't find a tinier app for this purpose anywhere else!

See here for other alternatives.

My ideal solution is something like Cathy with these features as well:

• Auto snapshot Drives on a scheduled period, storing incremental images. (You can sort of do this using a task scheduler and git or mercurial I suppose, but haven't tried it yet)
• Have a compare option as well. (See FilePro which has this option)
• Then sync my various PCs and hard drives via dropbox/others

And voila! I have instant search access to all my Disks, plus a backup archive to see my list of files in case of disaster.

I just found ScanFS today, but it had some errors while scanning a catalog, and not as Hard Drive centric as Cathy.

Oh that reminds me, I forgot my most often used one that has now been unsupported since 2011 http://locate32.cogit.net/ That can also be used as a cataloger though it requires more effort in adding databases. Great for searching but poor for browsing.

So my final recommendation is still cathy. Damn I have so many great ideas for Cathy, but the author is unwilling to release the source (i asked).

Some more research links:

• http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1716
• http://www.indexyourfiles.com/
• http://www.softprime.com/

Where is it?

WhereIsIt is an application written for Windows operating systems, and designed to help you maintain and organize a catalog of your computer media collection, including CD-ROMs and DVDs, audio CDs, diskettes, removable drives, hard drives, network drives, remote file servers, or any other present or future storage media device Windows can access as a drive.

It's shareware.

there are a lot of free alternatives, but, if you don't need fancy stuff like image thumbnailing, metadata extraction, etc. i've found the best solution is to use regular plaintext files generated with:

• dir /s /b > myindex.dir (on Windows, store file names only)
• du -ac > myindex.du (on Linux, store file names + sizes)
• rhash --crc32 --sfv -r . > myindex.sfv (multiplatform tool, store file names + sizes + moddates + hashes to easily find duplicates)

advantages:

• you can read, edit and search plaintext files anywhere, on any OS (you are not bound to any proprietary file format, no need to install any specific software)
• index generation is usually faster than any disk cataloger software (because they usually build binary search trees)

downsides:

• interactive file tree browsing is not possible currently (see my requests here and here)
• linear search is slower than binary search, but for small datasets is acceptable, especially in modern computers...

tips:

• you can sort the indexes in folders like "burned_discs", "external_hdds", "internal_hdds", "pendrives", etc.
• if you are not comfortable with the command-line you can add a shortcut in the right-click menu of your filemanager to generate the index of any folder...

See the freeware Gentibus CD.
It works well for all file types and has a good and quick search function (that you can see in the image below):