It catalogs all the files on a hard drive, and even makes thumbnail images of their contents that you can browse. The program sees all the hard drives attached to your computer, and allows you to choose which one(s) you want to index. It does everything WhereIsIt? could do, and more. I don’t know why I never came across it before, since the website indicates the program has been available since 2001. The one I am trying right now is called WinCatalog2019 ( ). Happily, there are some more recent efforts at file indexing available. I couldn’t keep playing with it to keep it functional, so I decided to hunt for something new. It hasn’t been updated since 2014, and recently I noticed it was not only slowing down and failing to complete index updates, it was even freezing and requiring a machine reboot. ( Unfortunately, the program is starting to show its age. Eventually, vendors produced similar Windows-based programs, and for the past 12 years, I’ve relied on a pretty good program called “WhereIsIt?” to index multiple external drives. Once Windows became widespread, MS-DOS programs like Magellan lost their usefulness. It even had “viewers” allowing you to peek inside the file without actually opening it in its native software. If you could remember a phrase or text string, Magellan would show you a list of the files that contained that text string. Magellan scanned your hard drive (back in the days when a really big hard drive might be 5-10 megabytes) and produced a searchable index. People who remember the dawn of the personal computer era may remember a Lotus Development Corp. That’s where file indexing and cataloguing software comes into the picture. This all works out fine if I can associate some file with a client, but if I’m looking for a file with a specific content or text sequence in the name, and can’t remember the client it was associated with, the system breaks down. If I produce video for the client, there is a client-named folder on one of the external hard drives I use for video or audio projects, and the individual projects have subfolders there.

In each client folder there are subfolders, usually named for a year, and all the documents for that client for that year go into the appropriate folder. Every client has a folder named for the client. I am pretty compulsive about file and folder naming on my computer.

Wincatalog 2019 review