CDFinder Video Tutorial: Catalog your data



For CDFinder to work its magic finding your hidden digital treasures, it first needs to catalog your data once.



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Catalog your data with CDFinder

For CDFinder to work its magic finding your hidden digital treasures, it first needs to catalog your data once.

You can simply click the "Catalog Disk" button to catalog an entire disk. Just select it from the list of mounted volumes, done.

Or you can simply drag a disk from the Finder into the left side of the CDFinder window. That will also start cataloging it.

Of course, CDFinder cannot just catalog entire disks, that would be lame. You can also just catalog important folders. Again either drag them from the Finder into the left part of the CDFinder window, or use the "Catalog Folder" menu command.

Hint: The menus of CDFinder hold a lot of interesting functions, make sure you have a look at them...

To help you find your data better, CDFinder not simply reads the names of your files and folders when cataloging, but it can also read a huge amount of helpful additional data as well, such as photo thumbnails, or the MP3 tags of song files.

You control what CDFinder catalogs with the Preferences. Here, in the "Cataloging" section, you can tell CDFinder for which types of files you wish to have a thumbnail, and what size it should have.

The Media-Info is even more extensive, and covers video, photo, as well as audio files.

But CDFinder can do a lot more! During cataloging, it can peek inside compressed archive files to gather their content, detecting ZIP, RAR, TAR, and other formats. CDFinder is even the first cataloger on the Mac that can catalog the contents of disk image files for you!

And sometimes there is unwanted information you don't need, so you can ignore things like invisible files or folders, icon and alias files, or the contents of bundles or file packages, such as applications, to speed up cataloging and to create a cleaner catalog.

That wasn't all yet!
CDFinder can attach a serial number to any new catalog - making filing large numbers of disks easier, and CDFinder can even catalog version info of files and their Spotlight or Finder comments.

CDFinder can also generate a FileCheck value for every file it catalogs. That is powerful if you are concerned about long time storage. At any time, you can ask CDFinder to verify these FileCheck values either for a particular file, or for an entire catalog, and you can then check that all files are in fact unchanged and safely stored.

At last, you can control how much depth CDFinder catalogs. If you just need the top level items on your disks, set this up here.

You can set all these preferences either globally, using the CDFinder Preferences window, but you can also tell CDFinder to show you these cataloging specific preferences for each volume you catalog. Just use this checkbox here, or hold down the Command key just before a cataloging process begins in CDFinder. Then you will see these options again, but they will then only apply to the disk you are about to catalog.

And there is one more thing: If you have changed the content of a disk, you can ask CDFinder to update an existing catalog by selecting it, and using the "Update Catalog" in the File menu. Then, CDFinder will quickly run over the disk, update everything, while keeping your comments and labels for files and folders in that catalog alive.

CDFinder - The Search is Over!