DiskCat is a free program for the Windows operating system that enables you to create catalogs of drives connected to the computer system.
The program catalogs all files on the selected drive and lets you search across the data from within its interface.
First thing you do after starting it up is to create a catalog. This is done with a click on the selected drive button at the top and the selection of a drive letter.
Please note that you won’t be able to index the main drive of the system but all others as well as every drive that is connected to the machine at the time.
The creation is quick but may take a couple of minutes depending on the size of the drive and its data.
Each indexed drive or disc is listed by the program in its interface afterwards. The two options provided for those are to search for files or to browse them. Browse is a bit misleading however as it simply opens the database’s location on the hard drive but does not provide you with options to browse the contents of the indexed drive or disc.
Good news is that search finds items across all indexed locations. Once you hit search after indexing at least one location, you are taken to the search interface.
Simply type a search phrase, for instance part of a file name or file extension and hit search afterwards.
The program displays all matching results in list form in the same interface. A filter option is displayed to the right which you can make use of to filter the results further.
If you have searched for a file extension for example, you can use it to filter results you are not interested in. You can right-click on results to get additional options such as limiting results to the selected catalog or hiding the selected results from the interface.
While you get the list of all files found, you don’t get options to launch them right from this location. While that may not be a problem for some users of the software, others would likely appreciate an option to launch files on drives connected to the computer at the time.
Since there is no option right now for that, the only option you have is to navigate to the location manually.
The preferences list three additional indexing options:
- Include empty folders when creating disk catalogs.
- Scan and index inside archives found in a drive path.
- Also save file index listings inside catalog zip archives.
Closing Words
DiskCat is a well designed software program for Windows that lets you index drives or discs connected to the computer, and to search across all or select locations locally even if the drive is not connected to the system at that time.
Search could use improvements though; especially the lack of options to launch a file directly from within the search interface needs to be mentioned in this regard.
An alternative to that is Cathy, a tiny portable catalog software for Windows.
Now you: do you use disk cataloging software?