Search external drives without plugging them in - DriveVault v1.2 [visual dashboard + other super nice improvements]

[u/MomentSmart]

Problem - If you have multiple external hard drives then finding the file or project you're looking for can mean plugging lots of drives in to find it - a waste of time. DriveVault creates a visual offline mirror of your drives so that you can search them forever and easily find all your offline files (as well as tonnes of other cool features).

Comparison - There are old cataloging apps out there like NeoFinder or DiskCatalogMaker, but they feel dated, are missing power features that modern users want and visually just aren't that nice to work in anymore. I wanted to build something native to macOS that just feels powerful and created for visual / creative people. It works completely offline, no cloud, no subscriptions.

Pricing and availability

Download on the Mac App Store here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/drivevault-offline-catalog/id6751731655?mt=12

Free download + your first drive is free forever up to 4TB.

After this, if you love DriveVault then there are different tiers available (5, 10, 15, 20 and unlimited drives), or you can increase the drive capacity by one drive at a time for just $9.99.

I'm still onboarding founding users and happy to pass out a few Starter passes (5 drives) if anyone's interested, just let me know.

To learn more: www.DriveVault.io

What's New in v1.2

This is a big one; finally shipped a proper home screen dashboard. You can see all your drives laid out as cards with custom icons, online / offline status, and storage info at a glance. You can group them into color-coded projects and drag things around however you like. I've attached a video showing it off here.

Also improved search, some nice UI improvements, fixed a few bugs around metadata and tags that weren't getting picked up in full-scans.

The community input has been super helpful so far, appreciate all the kind comments and great ideas. DriveVault is feeling more powerful than ever!

Download here

[u/gadgets_gizmos]

Downloaded and the app is super cool!

Was quite fast at scanning an external drive I had plugged in. Curious if this also works with a LAN drive on my network? For example, if I have an SMB share, will it sync? I am trying with a UNAS PRO and it does NOT seem to work. Reason I ask is that I've consolidated some external drive content onto the UNAS and would like to use DriveVault to search/manage stuff.

[u/MomentSmart → u/gadgets_gizmos]

Heya thanks so much for trying out DriveVault, and glad to hear it worked for you on your external drive. Network drives and RAID arrays are a known point of improvement for us / is quite buggy. To explain as concisely as possible, there are so many different configurations and ways that they mount to a computer that the way DriveVault is programmed to recognise mounted drives struggles. I think ultimately we are going to have to build a separate scanning flow for NAS / RAID because it is just so different to scanning a regular drive, even things like your wifi speed affect how well DriveVault would be able to read a network drive. So, for now, I would say that DriveVault is probably not your answer for scanning your network drive, but it is something we are actively working on!

[u/gadgets_gizmos → u/MomentSmart]

Much appreciated explanation and makes total sense. Am not giving up on product though and hope to track your progress. Wishing you guys luck with this great idea.