■ Discover and preview files in offline external storage

If you are old enough to know why drive letters begin with C:\ instead of A, you don't need to be told it's been a long journey from floppy disks to Cloud storage. Cloud is convenient but isn't suitable for all storage scenaria. Even if we disregard availability issues, how do you put a 2GB movie in the cloud? Do you trust your confidential documents or source code with some Google drive or Onedrive? Do you seriously believe that google won't have a peek? Or some random hacker?

If you grant me that traditional down-to-earth storage is still relevant, here's the rub: how do you find stuff in your external storage media? Searching your local hard disk is fast and easy, but windows search does not find anything unless the device is connected. What if you have 10 external USB hard disks and a few dozen DVDs (or CDRs even if you are really old school :), how do you keep track of their contents? Where is that video with baby Vanessa shot 7 years ago in London? Where is it backed up?

Introducing DeskRule v2.0 with offline search catalog

This problem discovering where did you put that movie or some other infrequently used file is nicely tackled by deskrule's new catalog search feature. First you build an index of all your removable external storage media (USB drives, DVDs, thumbdrives etc), then you can find your documents quickly — while your devices are not attached to your PC. Deskrule will find your file and tell you which storage device you need to connect to open it. Optionally you can add a short text and thumbnail preview for your offline files in the search catalog.

Here are the main points of the new catalog search feature:

Allows you to find documents, movies etc in external devices that are not connected
Catalog searches are seamless, and work exactly the same as regular local folder searches
You can search by plain name/dates or extended file properties (tags, title, author etc)
You can do partial content searches (find text in documents) depending on the size of the text preview
Preview search results offline (unformatted text and thumbnails)
Discover the removable device that holds the actual files and connect it for further work
Reliable offline catalog with industrial strength database that can index millions of files

Click to download Deskrule (free trial)

Minimum requirements: windows Vista or later (32 or 64 bit)

So if you know of any family members — of the compulsive hoarder variety — with tons of downloaded movies scattered in lots of external hard disks, who have no clue where exactly do they have Star Wars V (Empire strikes back) stored, now you know which program they need for Christmas :)