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What is on all my hard drives? — an inventory without plugging each one in

Years of drives, each with some overlap, none labelled well. The question is rarely "where is file X" — it is "what do I even have, and which drive is it on?" This guide turns the drawer into a map.

How ArchiveMind does it

Each drive you catalogue becomes a repository, remembered by name, with every file's path, type, size and date, thumbnails for photos and PDFs, extracted text, duplicate relationships and a connection state: Online (plugged in now), Offline (seen before, not present) or Missing (never seen at its recorded location). Everything stays browsable and searchable with the drive in the drawer.

Steps

  1. Catalogue each drive once (see How to catalogue an external hard drive). Name them so the name answers "which drive": "Silver 2 TB — photos 2012–2016" beats "Untitled".
  2. Open Browse. Pick a repository to see what it contains, as a list or a gallery, and narrow by file type, year or folder. This is the view for "what is on the silver drive?"
  3. Open Overview for the whole collection at a glance — how much of what, where.
  4. Search across everything. Every result names its drive, so a search answers both "do I have it?" and "which drive?"
  5. Open Duplicates to see which drives hold the same files — the usual surprise is how much of the drawer is copies of itself.

What it cannot do

  • Open a file from an unplugged drive. It tells you which drive to fetch; the file opens once the drive is back.
  • Replace labels on the drives. Put the repository name on a sticker on the drive; the catalogue knows the name, the drawer does not.
  • Know what changed since the last scan. Scan a drive again after adding or removing files on it.
  • Act as a backup. It is an inventory. A drive that fails is still lost; the inventory just tells you exactly what was lost.

See also