Review: CDFinder

Product Name: CDFinder 4.2.2
Company: West-Forest-Systems
URL: http://www.cdfinder.de
Category: System Utility
Price: $25, various multi-user deals available
Requirements: Any OS X computer or OS 9 computer with CarbonLib 1.6
Rating: 4 bounces - Pure Lust

Recently we looked at various ways to make backups of critical files using the tools that come with OS X. If you regularly back things up to CDs or DVDs, it is very easy to wind up with a whole pile of identical disks. Finding what you need from such a collection depends on you remembering which disk you recorded the desired files to. In some cases, it's easy enough; the project name is written on the disk, and only the one disk. But most of us put the date and time on our backup disks, and bits of each project are stored on lots of different disks. This means you have to go through the whole collection of disks to find the particular backup or files you're interested in. There must be an easier way!

Cataloguing files is as simple as dragging icons of disks to the main application window.

Cataloguing disks provides the solution. Instead of relying on what is written on a CD or its box, you keep a list of the files on each disk on your computer. Whenever you want to find something, you search the catalogue, and it returns the name of the disk containing that file, and you can go straight to it. If there are multiple versions of that file, the catalogue allows you to sort by date, or some other criterion, so that you can narrow down your search more efficiently. You could of course create these catalogues by hand using a database program, and backup software may allow you to do this automatically, but CDFinder provides such a simple and versatile solution that it really is an essential utility.

Getting Up and Running

Installation is simply a case of download and drag to your Applications folder. It comes with a decent sized manual that is well written and includes lots of screenshots, though the basics of the program can be picked up pretty much as you go along. The first time you launch the program, a wizard takes you through initial configuration and then lets you start cataloguing. Cataloguing is as simple as dragging a volume to the program's main window. On my machine (a 1 GHz PowerBook with a SuperDrive) a CD-ROM took under just a few seconds to catalogue, and bigger volumes proportionally more, but overall the process is very fast. This will depend of course on the speed of your machine and the volume being read, how many files and folders are on the volume, and so on.

It is also important to note that while the name of the program is CDFinder, you are not limited to just CDs. DVDs, Zip disks and other removable drives can be catalogued, as can the hard disk of your computer, your iDisk, disk images, even your iPod. You can also catalogue just a folder, for example your Home folder. There is obvious usefulness to this if you don't really want to waste time cataloguing your entire hard drive, just the stuff you work with. A batch mode allows you to feed in a whole series of disks or folders rather than drag and drop each one to the application window.

By default, CDFinder stores the catalogue files in your Documents folder.

The user can set cataloguing parameters and these will influence how much is catalogued and consequently how quickly the job is done. You can choose to catalogue invisible items for example, which makes a CDFinder catalogue of your hard disk a handy way to access these elusive files, should you have to. You can also set it to search inside certain types of archive, such as Stuffit files. With this option, catalogues can be browsed deeper than they can in the Finder, allowing you to extract single files from these archives. If you use Stuffit to create backups, this feature will be very handy indeed.

CDFinder can catalogue individual files within Stuffit archives.

CDFinder uses a format shared with a similar Windows program, CDWinder, but will additionally import existing catalogues from a variety of older disk cataloguing programs such as the Iomega FindIt application that came with many of their removable drives. It cannot export to these catalogue formats though. By default, CDFinder stores its catalogues files in the user's Documents folder, but this can be changed. However, for single users placing them here makes the most sense: it keeps them somewhere you can see and remember to add to your backups. If you need to, you can also export catalogues to tab delimited text files that are readable by a variety of applications such as Excel and FileMaker.

Catalogues can be exported to the tab delimited text file format that is readable by a whole variety of data storage and processing applications including Excel and FileMaker.

Finding Files with CDFinder

Once you've catalogued your CDs and other disks, you can eject the disks and store them away. CDFinder now allows you to browse the files and folders on the disks quickly, as well as carry out more specific searches. This is where CDFinder works best, as a quick tool for finding stuff, and if you have dozens of CDs and other disks, you'll quickly come to depend on the program. You can also use it in a Finder-like kind of way, once you have the item located, you can open to archive or document from the CDFinder window directly without the need to return to the Finder and burrow through the directory of the disk or drive in question. It has to be said that this didn't work 100% reliably; sometimes nothing happened, and only quitting and then re-launching CDFinder returned this functionality. This was pretty much the only bug I cam across while using the program.

The CDFinder is Finder-like, so that you can (usually) open documents directly from it, providing the correct disk is inserted.

While read-only disks need not be catalogued more than once, for CDFinder to work well you will need to regularly update your catalogues. The quickest way is to use an AppleScript from the CDFinder's Script menu that updates all the local files at once. This usually takes just a few seconds per volume.

AppleScript can be used to automate some aspects of the program, and a script menu lets you do things like update local hard drives quickly.

Updating catalogues for writable disks such as hard drives and iPods is essential if you want your catalogues to be useful.

Labelling catalogues and files has some use if you work on distinct projects and keep files and archives for each one separate. You can add your own labels to CDFinder, and these can be used during searches, so that you might choose only to search for files ending with ".EPS" in only those catalogues labelled "The Jones Project". Alternatively, you might have a single unlabelled catalogue that includes files and folder labelled in different ways, so that you could search for stuff labelled 'Master Thesis' one time and 'Multimedia' the next. One thing you cannot do with CDFinder is applying labels downward from a given directory, i.e., tell CDFinder to label a folder, and all files and folders inside it, in a certain way. So if you want to mix labels on a single disk, you need to label files and folders at each level manually.

Labelling catalogues to projects, users, or by types of content, makes it easier to find things quickly.

Multi-User and Multi-Platform Environments

CDFinder works well in situations where more than one user needs to share the same set of catalogues. Where multiple users work on a single Macintosh, the catalogue files could be moved to the Shared User folder. That way, everyone can use them, and they're also easy to get at for making backups (if you share a lot of stuff between users, it's a good habit to backup not just your Home folder but the Shared User folder as well). Provided the network connecting the computers is reliable, setting CDFinder to use catalogues on a remote volume allows more than one workstation to have access to those files simultaneously, which is obviously useful for people working on group projects or sharing data such as client files or graphics.

Another handy feature is that since the CDFinder application uses the same file format as the Windows application CDWinder, both applications can read and write to a single set of catalogue files. In effect, the catalogue files are like web pages, it's the reader that is particular to the platform, not the data files. Once again, the trick is to set CDFinder up to use the catalogue files on the remote file server being shared by both the Mac and Windows computers.

There are a couple of things to consider when working with CDFinder in multi-user environments. Firstly, each user needs to be using registered copies of CDFinder (and CDWinder, if applicable). Users need also to be aware of naming restrictions particular to each platform, and CDFinder will not allow users to name catalogues using forbidden characters, such as forward slashes. But beyond these two points, CDFinder lends itself easily to use in a mixed platform environment.

Conclusion

CDFinder is a deep, well thought out product that offers tremendous bang for the buck, and definitely places itself as one of the most useful bits of shareware out there. The unregistered version only allows you to catalogue five volumes, but that is more than enough to convey the power of the thing, and after a while you will wonder what you did without it. Anyone working in a situation where they need to handle large quantities of artwork or documentation stored on different disks will enjoy being able to browse or search the CDFinder catalogue without the need to insert and eject dozens of disks. In the absence of heavyweight backup software, CDFinder provides a viable way to catalogue both writable and read-only disks and make it easy to find files afterwards. Use it with lightweight backup software such as Stuffit Deluxe 8 or Apple's Backup application, and you have a complete strategy for creating archives in the good times, and recovering stuff quickly and efficiently in the bad. Highly recommended.

- Dr. Neale Monks

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