Cataloging contents of removable volumes

by Dan Frakes
It’s been a while since we covered a utility to help you keep track
of the contents of “removable” volumes—external hard drives,
CDs, DVDs, network shares, etc. In fact, the last time we talked
about such an app in Mac Gems was back in October 2004, when Jonathan
Seff recommended DiskTracker (). That $30 utility automatically
scans removable volumes and keeps a searchable database of their
contents.

I’ve recently discovered an interesting alternative: Limit Point
Software’s free (donations accepted) Touvaly 1.1 (). In addition
to being less expensive—who doesn’t like free?—Touvaly also
takes a very different approach to cataloging your volumes: Instead
of keeping track of their contents in its own database file, Touvaly
“recreates” those volumes on your Mac’s local hard drive. But it
doesn’t actually copy the contents of a volume onto your drive;
instead, it creates a folder that represents those contents by
including a “pseudo copy”—the company’s term, not mine—of
every file and folder on that volume, mirroring the original
hierarchy.e.net

http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macgems/2006/03/touvaly/index.php