10.4: Create an index of backup disks' filenames

Oct 24, '06 07:30:04AM

Contributed by: enderai

I've found this quick tip to be useful when creating backup optical discs, or moving data for projects off of my hard drive: Save a text file containing the paths of all the files on the disk with the name of the disc. This is easily done using the find command from the command line.

For example, with a disk named backup-cd-2006-10-19, the Terminal command would look like this:

$ cd /Volumes/backup-cd-2006-10-19/
$ find . > ~/Documents/Backup-Indexes/backup-cd-2006-10-19.txt
Now, any time you do a Spotlight search for the name of a file that happens to be on the disc, your backup index file appears in the results, letting you know to look there, also.

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