I've been looking for a portable file indexer for quite a while. When I say indexer, I'm thinking of the functions that Google Desktop, Yahoo Desktop and Copernic Desktop do. I'd like to have a self-contained indexer on my USB drive.
In addition, is there any kind of file indexer that can create an index of removable media on a desktop computer? I have 100+ CDs with data on them, and it'd be great to be able to index them all, and have that index available on my desktop. This program would live on the desktop and accumulate index entries from each of the 100+ CDs.
Are there any such things?
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Previously, I left two questions. One was about the possibility of having an indexer that is portable. I believe I have found one, albeit, it has a number of pre-conditions for it to work portably.
It is called Wilbur: http://wilbur.redtree.com
The pre-conditions primarily depend on the USB drive always having the same drive letter. I figure there is a way to work around this to make it truly portable. In my case, I have control over the machines I use, so the program works properly wherever I want to use it. That is, I set the Computer Management on each computer I use to always assign the letter G to my portable drive.
The program was written for Win95, and I installed it on one computer. Then I copied the Wilbur folder from the Program Files directory of that computer to the USB drive. Then I uninstalled the program from the computer. There are some software requirements (aimed at machines in the win95 generation) regarding dlls. I have not had any problems with XP and this program.
Even if your USB drive does not always get the same drive letter, you can easily edit your index task to point to the correct drive letter and re-build the index. For me, and my 18000+ files, it took about 90 seconds to create a new index.
I have not found an indexer to create an incremental index to include all my data CDs, but I did find a program called Catfish that creates filename indexes, and it is doing a fair job for me so far.