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I have used Locate32 for that purpose with a bunch of mostly offline external usb drives. You can make a search index of a drive then save it to your PC and get search queries done without having to plug in the disks and spin them up. The only thing I don't like about it is manually telling it to reindex changes is slightly tedious. Software designated for cataloging CD/DVD media is probably what you want to look for (and just repurpose it for offline disks) but I don't know of any other examples.
I'd suggest you think long & hard before starting to work on that.
You'll have to decide beforehand how you want to:
organize your pictures;
organize your videos;
organize your e-books, PDFs, webpages and whatnot;
organize your personal documents;
&c.
Once you're happy with your plan give a thought to backups. Where can you securely keep duplicates of important stuff? (Remember, external drives are cheap.) A backup software will automate that. (I use SynckBackFree but there are many other ones.)
Some file indexer will come in handy to find things without having to click through loads of folders. People seem to like Everything but I'm happy with Locate32. You can then search by name (with wildcards), date, containing folder, file type, &c.
To move things manually around use a multipane file browser. Q-Dir has up to four panes, tabs, and can have its look configured (e. g. different colors for different filetypes).
Portableapps.com or The Portable Freeware Collection will get you portable versions of these, or similar, no install needed.
I use https://locate32.cogit.net/ to find files fast on windows.
I also separate everything into an "Archive" folder and a "New" folder. Everything in Archive is something that I looked at and decided to keep.
These folders exist for each category, i.e. Music, Movies etc.
I've tried tagging but found it too involved/time consuming.
Now I rely simply on a consistent folder structure with names which mean something to me. If I have to search for a specific file I use Locate; others seem to like Everything for that.
When having to drag files around Q-Dir has up to four panes, tabs and color schemes. (Portable version on Portableapps.com)
A matter of personal preferences and workflow style.
use locate32 https://locate32.cogit.net/ to do a fulldrives scan and search for file name to see if theyre still there somewhere, if not youre out of luck, getting back deleted files from an SSD is kinda hard (impossible).
i dont understand this, important documents should be in the cloud or multiple backups especially for study.
You can also give Locate32 a try, I use it daily on Win10.
If your needs are too specific for it you can also find/copy/move/rename/&c. your files with some scripting language. I'd suggest NewLisp:
free, no install;
very simple syntax and outstanding documentation;
has regex;
can call shell functions, e. g. COPY, MOVE, &c.
Nothing to stop you from building a tailor-made CSV database for your files with it. ;-)
What I want is the old windows 7 search, but with out the problematic index cache updates slowing everything down.
I usually use locate32 when I want to search for file names. It's the updatedb and locate commands from linux, but built for windows. It only stores the location and file names of files. No more no less.
My favorite indexing/searching tool (filenames only), for when your collections gets so big that you no longer have the time to sort it into folders: https://locate32.cogit.net/
Locate32 is what I use. You scan your whole drive(s) – takes roughly 1+ mn / TB – and then search to your heart's content with operators, folder selection and advanced options (which I never had to use…).
A little out of the box but I LOVE Locate32 for windows. It's a port of the equally amazing Linux locate command. If you're patient and specific you'll find anything and everything.