What is dindexer?

dindexer (from "Disc Indexer") is a program to help you keep track of where your files are as you back them up on external media. It's like updatedb/locate, but it's thought for never changing removable media, such as DVDs and BluRays.

Running dindexer on your disks will build a list of all your files and directories. You can associate those lists to a descriptive name and a number, so it's easy to find on what disk a file is on the next time you search for that file.

dindexer will also help you keeping track of duplicate data.

Configuration

As dindexer needs to write data to a PostgreSQL database, you need to configure access to it. Create a ~/.config/dindexer.yml file with the settings to connect to your database. For example:

%YAML 1.2
---
db_settings:
    username: bob_db
    password: my_secret_db_password
    dbname: dindexerdb
    port: 5432
    address: 127.0.0.1

Usage

Using dindexer is pretty straightforward: mount your DVD and scan it. For example:

mount /dev/cdrom /media/my_backup
dindexer --setname "My generic backup 2015-11-13" /media/my_backup

The program will go through every file in the path you specify. Hashing everything in that path could take a bit of time, so please be patient.

You can run dindexer --help to see a list of available switches.

Build instructions

Dependencies

The following libraries must be available on your system:

• PostgreSQL (libpq)
• Boost 1.53 or later
• yaml-cpp 0.5.1 or later

Linux

mkdir dindexer_build
cd dindexer_build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release <path to dindexer source>
make -j2

Other platforms

I never tested dindexer on anything other than Linux. Note that the code assumes paths to be Unix-like. Other than that, there shouldn't be any major problem to porting the code.

Project status

This project is at an early stage and is still being developed. Currently, only the indexer has been implemented. You can search the database manually if you know how to write the SQL queries you will need.

Useful technical details

Queries

Find duplicates

List all duplicate files belonging to different sets:

select files.hash, group_id, t.ct from files
inner join (
    select hash, count(*) as ct from files group by hash having count(distinct group_id) > 1
) t
on t.hash = files.hash
group by files.hash, group_id, t.ct order by files.hash;

Set number

In the sets table you can find a disk_number column that is currently not used. This is in case you have numbered discs, so you are free to put any number you like in that column.