Looking for a software that gives me an overview of ALL files on my external HDD

[Lomaxxx]

Hey Community,

to due the fact that i have a massive amount of external drives i completely lost overview whats on every HDD. Right now i am using a FANTEC QB-X8U31, 8 x 3,5" HDD external Tower to get my hdds connected to my Mac Studio. The problem is, that i have way more than eight 3,5" HDDs and so i need to swap all the time to find the files i am looking.

You maybe asking why i have so many HDDs and also in 3,5" format. This is easy to answer. Around 20+ years i am working as a graphic designer and also doing lots of stuff in After Effects and Premiere and also in 3D Programs. People from the same business will know the huge amount of data and size these files can have.

So i was thinking of a software that reads the entire structure from the HDD and if possible make a TXT, PDF etc out from it. I know finder can do it but i need also all subfolders, because i am a friend of making folder with date and stuff like that to stay organized (at least with this 😀)

Does anyone knows if such a software is existing or something i could use for this?

thank you

 

[Wando64]

The ls -R Unix command should list you all the files on the disk, and it should be fairly straight forward to direct its output to a TXT file.
My knowledge of Unix is quite limited but someone here should be able to give you a short script to do what you are looking for.

Essentially from the Terminal you will need to go to the disk you want to list with the command similar to this:
cd /volumes/“name of your disk”

Then send the list of files to a txt file with something similar to this:
ls -R > file.txt

 

[Bigwaff]

.. and you don’t care about any information contained in the files, no searching of data within, only file names?

 

[Bigwaff]

I suspect you maybe looking for something like DiskCatalogMaker or similar…

DiskCatalogMaker

DiskCatalogMaker is a simple disk management tool which catalogs disks and folders.

diskcatalogmaker.com

 

[Lomaxxx]

As i said before there are many HDDs older than maybe 50% of the forum user (just kidding). At the time when these files were created no one had in mind they a) would last that long and b) i am still having these.

For sure i give every file a name, but always swapping HDDs in the Fantec without even knowing on which HDD the file is i am searching for is a time wasting.

DiskCatalogMaker is 100% exactly what i was looking for. Already bought it and it makes exactly what i need.

thank you so much, because i googled maybe the wrong words like "get an overview of all your files on HDD", "print all your files on HDD" without any good results

thanks

 

[gilby101]

So i was thinking of a software that reads the entire structure from the HDD and if possible make a TXT, PDF etc out from it

I use File List Export (from Mac App Store). Save results as CSV or Excel formats. Results include some file metadata.