My Digital Life Made Easier

I pride the Mac OS on its ability to remain compatible with legacy apps…up to a point. At some point, something has to break, and sadly for me that was Extensis Portfolio.

I had used this app for years, even back in the days of Mac OS 9, to catalog remote volumes. Even with 1TB of storage space, the practice of archiving to optical disc is not going to go away anytime soon. In fact, I’ve gotten it down to a science.

But archiving is pretty useless if you can’t find what you need relatively quickly. Enter CDFinder, a shareware app that has been around a long time. I used to use it back in the Mac OS 9 days when it was a system extension that automatically cataloged a 3-1/2" floppy disc (yes, you read that correctly, floppy disc) upon ejection, which today would present a problem being that most removable media is rated in Gigibytes.

Portfolio has increased in price to $199.00 per copy. I can purchase Apple’s Aperture 3 for only $79.00, and that’s an app that really does something. $199.00 is simply too much to pay for a removable media cataloging application. Extensis has priced themselves out of the market. At $39.99, CDFinder is priced just right.

After testing CDFinder I was pleased to find that it does exactly what I need it to do, and I like the way it stores its files. Searching is a breeze, and I can search across one or more of the catalogs, each of which appears as a separate file within the CDFinder database file/folder structure. Like Portfolio, you simply drag a disc to the CDFinder sidebar (or to a folder of your choice in the sidebar), and a dialog opens to select your cataloging options (you can set them in preferences, but override them if you wish each time you create a new catalog.)

The practice of archiving to optical disc and cataloging is going to be even more important in the future as we see the demise of the distribution of  applications and media being distributed by optical disc. Apple has announced that Lion, the next generation of the Mac OS, will only be available as a software download. Which means at some point you will need to burn it to a bootable DVD.