What is Reddit's opinion of Virtual Volumes View?

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I don't have quite the hoard most people do, but I use VVV (Virtual Volumes View) to keep track of my BD-Rs and USB hard drives.

It does pretty much what you said. It indexes all the metadata so you can search offline, and then just go grab the appropriate media.

Might not be the best program, but it's the one I found when I'd looking for one, so it works for me.

YES!!

you want VVV

VirtualVolumesView - that is exactly what it does and it does so well. Multiple drives external and internal pure cataloguing. Can be portable.

VVV (Virtual Volumes View) http://vvvapp.sourceforge.net/ creates an offline, searchable database of your drives. You can also export the directory tree to a txt or csv file.

I also use and recommend Everything www.voidtools.com as a live search engine.

Virtual Volumes View http://vvvapp.sourceforge.net/

It's standalone, but the interface is just like File Explorer. I often forget I'm not in live mode until I try to open a file!

The really great thing is you can save the catalog as a separate file. I forgot to reinstall it until right now. Installed and pulled up my saved catalog. Back to where I left off months ago!

Common question. Common answers.

Everything www.voidtools.com, which will give you a live update whenever you open it and you export to a .csv file.

VVV (Virtual Volumes View) http://vvvapp.sourceforge.net/ will create an offline searchable database of you drives that you can manually update. You can also export the directories to a .csv file.

> If you're missing a drive it'll only mount in a "degreaded" state, which is read-only if at all

Thought as much, but still I shall keep it in mind for other projects.

>A good first stop when doing this is just to google "alternative to <thing>"

Thanks for the tip, but when I decided I could no loner live with Windows and wanted to come over to Linux, I made a list of Windows based applications that I could not live without and went on a hunt for Linux (FOSS) alternatives before making the actual switch. As mentioned previously of that long list the only remaining one is the Where Is It software, which is the sole reason why I still keep a W10 VM around. Every entry on that list has been replaced with a, in my opinion much better, Linux alternative so far. Since Where Is It is such an important part of my data archival workflow though I have been looking into alternatives periodically ever since hoping for something interesting to pop up. From my research the closest Linux based app, which also runs on Windows as a matter of fact, would be Virtual Volumes View which is also available on that alternative to list you linked. But sadly it is a bare bone version of what Where Is It is at the moment with in my opinion decades of development required to catch up.

Either way, thank you for all the information you provided, this was very helpful indeed.

cheers.

On Windows, WinCatalog is 60% off today, it does what you want, and more, for 20USD. Everything is a file indexer which gives you instant search for all your drives for free.

For other OS (and also for Win), VVV is a free alternative.

is this one http://vvvapp.sourceforge.net/download.html ? how to make the catalogs ? i dont in the site and in the gui only the "new" and "open" button work but both dont let me select disk drives

Not a pro, but ultimately the answer is time, patience and good organizational skills.

Determine what makes the most sense to you, e.g. sort by file name, type, date, etc. Then organize them into drives or folders, leaving space for additions. Use of a renamer as suggested is very helpful.

If the files are video, audio or pictures, you can use organizers that read the metadata or EXID data for cataloging.

I don't use any type of organizer. I search Everything for live drive searches and VVV (Virtual Volumes View) for a live and offline database of the contents of my drives.

My personal system for videos is to organize by directors, actresses, variety shows, series, etc, all in individual folders inside individual drives, e.g. Directors A-H on one drive, Actresses A-H on another drive. All drives have room for expansion. As long as I know the category or partial name, I can find any video within seconds.

Some of the variety shows I collect have hundreds of episodes. For those I keep an offline copy of the Wiki page which contains all the details of the episodes. This is critical for me because almost all of my collection is Asian and no catalog program would be able to automatically scrape the info for me.

I use a program called VVV to scan drives for back up and then you can search and navigate to those files to check which drive they might be stored on. Maybe you can find a way to get this to work how you need it to?

... so do you mean something to organize media for you, something that's just adding some meta data to tag things as preferred (I guess so you can make sure those items are backed up easier?), or something to keep an archive of what exists?

For the first two options there, I don't really have anything for you, but if you're just trying to keep an archive of what exists I recommend VVV. I've been using it for years now and it's pretty great. It is GUI based but you just point it at a directory, so I run it on my laptop and have it scan my server's shares over SMB.