14 DAY TRIAL // Storage capacity has been constantly increasing for a long time. From kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes and soon terabytes, the standard capacity of computer hard drives lets us store more and more information. At the same time the size of files themselves has also gone up dramatically and while at one point not even developers could fathom filling up an entire CD with content, today an entire CD can be filled with just a handful of very high resolution photos. Similarly, when CDs first started becoming mainstream, they could hold two to three times the amount of information that your average computer could. Today, the standard DVD capacity is dwarfed by the size of the average hard drive and new standards such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are still far from becoming mainstream. While catalogue applications can be used to search and browse through all the files on your removable media, people who like to keep things simple and familiar will prefer Touvaly.
What it does Touvaly is a little application that can be used to create pseudo-copies of files, folders and even volumes. These copies will retain the name, placing, size and comments of files, but they will lack the actual data form making them take up minimal space. Much like aliases give you ghost copies of files and folders, Touvaly will give you ghost copies of entire volumes.
Working with it Unlike cataloging applications in which you do everything, from scanning the volume to browsing and searching for files and folders, Touvaly only really does one thing. Because the pseudo-copies that the program creates are made up of regular files and folders, working with them is identical to working with anything else on your computer. The application will only make the copie; beyond that, you can use the Finder or any other application you prefer to locate things within them.
Not only is Touvaly's only function to create pseudo-copies, doing so is also amazingly simple. All one has to do is use drag and drop on its window, icon or dock icon, to feed it a file, or folder or an entire volume. After choosing a destination for the copy, you are pretty much done, even though the copying process will probably take some time, depending on what you are making a copy of.
While the actual act of making a copy is just a matter of a drag and a drop; getting the best results might depend on tweaking the preferences to match your needs. This is especially important since many of the preferences that can make a big difference are off by default. Since an entire volume can hold all kinds of information you might want to limit what is copied. If you are only interested in the folder hierarchy, there is an option to only copy folders, ignoring everything else. Another important option is that to ignore applications. This can be particularly helpful since today's applications are typically packages, which in turn contain many other folders and files which you don't really need a copy of. Last but not least any given folder can have many invisible files, which you will not need to make a copy of and can opt to ignore. The option to make pseudo files openable will let you get more out of the pseudo copies, by letting them act like aliases when you double click them or drop them onto Touvaly. For the really small files, you do not even need to create a pseudo-copy and the application lets you set a threshold so that all files that are below it will simply be copied as they are. Pseudo copies can also be made more like the originals by opting to have the resource fork copied along with the comments. This is especially important since it means that custom icons will be preserved, which can make all the difference for things like photo collections. Last but not least, you can set up the way Touvaly will behave by setting it to automatically make copies in a certain location and quit itself afterwards, thus giving you a very clean workflow when making lots of different copies.
Catalogue? Although what Touvaly does has been done by cataloguing applications, which create a database of your volumes, this application's approach offers several key advantages. First and foremost is the fact that you can browse pseudo-copies using the same familiar interface that you use for real files. Combined with the option to save resource forks this can make locating files visually much easier. The second is the inherent integration that this approach gives. Since you are not using a dedicated application that you have to be in to view the contents of your removable media, they will be available for all applications equally. Both Finder and Spotlight searches will be able to locate matching files even if they are on a CD somewhere on the other side of the room. This can make a huge difference if you often need to locate data on removable media.
The Good Very easy to use, builds upon the Finder to offer a simple cataloging method. Resulting pseudo-copies can be indexed and searched through directly with Finder or Spotlight.
The Bad Nothing bad with it except perhaps the moderately high price tag, which is only really worth it if you intend to use this application quite a lot. The option to update a pseudo copy once created would also not go amiss.
The Truth There are times when dedicated catalogue applications are better, but those times are few and far between. The simplicity of the Touvaly approach and the benefits it generates are simply great for anyone that works with lots of media on many remote or removable volumes.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
