If you’re like me, and who the hell is, you’ve got hundreds of dvds and cds full of movies, songs, pictures and everything else that you collect on your way around the Internet. Unlike most computer users, I do regular backups of my ‘stuff’. I actually have a folder on my desktop that is named Stuff! Into this folder goes everything that I want to save for posterity. Since I’ve been using the Internet since about 1996, there is lots of stuff to save.
I have all of the DVDs and CDs in one place, more or less. If you have a stack of these discs, maybe you spend a lot of time looking for something on one of the old backups. Your resume, for instance. Can you lay your hands on it immediately? I can, thanks to Cathy!
Cathy is a tiny bit of software written by Robert Vasicek, a Slovakian who lives in Bratislava, Slovakia. You can download the application from here http://www.mtg.sk/rva/ or in different other places around the Internet. Once it’s downloaded, unzip the folder and leave it on your desktop. That’s what I did anyway, you can do what you want.
Cathy doesn’t have to be installed on your computer. It just runs, it doesn’t have an installer program which is the reason it’s so small. Everything it needs to run is in the folder. Pop in a dvd or a cd, wait for a moment until it loads. Turn off any Windows thing that starts and then double click the cathy.exe file. Once it’s open, click the CATALOG tab and choose your drive, even the hard drive on your computer can be chosen, then click ADD. Cathy will scan the drive and make a list of everything that is on it.
Once Cathy is finished, you will have a small file in the same folder as the cathy.exe file that will be the image that cathy uses to tell you what is on the drive itself. Name the file with a name that makes sense to you. I tend to use things like ‘back up of laptop 08/2009’ or something similar. Now, once you have that image along with cathy.exe, you will be able to search for anything on the drive or the CD/DVD. If the CD/DVD is actually in the drive when you search, you can click on anything you want to see and it will open, just like it would in Windows Explorer.
I just scanned my C: drive on this laptop. Cathy tells me that I have 178,000 files, more or less and I know that I can find anything on it, much faster than Vista can, using cathy.exe. Besides this drive, I also have hundreds of DVDs and CDs that Cathy has also scanned for me. With recordable media, of course, the things that are on the CD or DVD cannot be changed so there is no need to update the database with these. On my hard drive, on the other hand, I would have to rescan it weekly in order to have an up-to-date version of it. If you name the file something that is easy to figure out, then you can simply delete the current record and make a new one any time you have to find something on your main or external hard drive.
To organize your life, simply mark the CD/DVD with the same name or number that you saved the file as, in order to keep the two things matched. Get it? Cathy will organize your collection of CDs or DVDs in a very short time, thanks to Mr. Vasicek! Thank him first and then thank me for letting you know about it. OK?