Finding your work
Where is that file?
Finding work on drives that are switched off.
A client rings about a job from 2019. The footage is on one of forty drives in a drawer, and the only way you know which one is to start plugging them in. There is a better answer, and it has nothing to do with buying more storage.
The problem is not storage. It is memory.
Nobody who shoots for a living runs out of drives. What runs out is the ability to remember what is on them.
It creeps up. Ten drives, and you know them by sight. Thirty, and you rely on the label. Sixty, and the label says BACKUP 2021, which was true when you wrote it and stopped being true four jobs later.
And the cost is never the drive. It is the forty minutes of plugging things in while someone waits for an answer, and the quiet worry that the file might not be anywhere at all.
Why the usual answers stop working
Everyone arrives at the same four, in roughly the same order. They are not silly — they work, up to a size. Knowing where each one breaks saves you from discovering it during a phone call.
| What everyone tries | Where it breaks |
|---|---|
| A spreadsheet of drives and contents | It is a copy of reality kept by hand, so it is only true on the day you write it. The drive you filled last Tuesday in a hurry is exactly the one missing from it — and that is the one you will look for. |
| A strict naming convention | It works beautifully until a second person joins, or until you accept a job that does not fit the scheme. Conventions do not survive contact with a deadline. |
| Labels on the drives | They describe the drive when it was filled, not now. And they answer the wrong question: you do not want to know what is on this drive, you want to know which drive has that file. |
| “I will just plug them all in” | Forty drives is an afternoon, and it wears the drives and the enclosures for nothing. It also fails silently: you can plug in all forty and still miss the file, because you were looking for a folder name you half remember. |
What they have in common is that they all ask you to remember. The catalogue exists in your head, and the drives are just boxes.
The other way round: let the drives remember
Plug a drive in once. NanoTracker writes down what is on it — the folders, and the files if you want them — and keeps that list after you unplug it. From then on you search the list, not the drives.
So the question stops being “which drive do I try first?” and becomes “Antonini”. And the answer comes in one of three shapes:
The third one is the one people do not expect, and in a studio it is the one that saves the most time: the drive you are about to search the whole shelf for is often in somebody else's machine.
What it looks like
One search box. No drive needs to be connected for this to answer.
search antonini
Four results, three different places, nothing plugged in.
And the question a project asks
There is a version of this problem that arrives from the other direction: you open a DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro or Lightroom project and half of it is offline. The programme tells you what is missing. It does not tell you which drive to go and get.
NanoTracker reads those projects — without opening them — and answers that question directly: this project needs these drives, and here is where each one is. It is the same search, asked by the project instead of by you.
Common questions
Can it really find files on a drive that is not plugged in?
Yes, because it is not searching the drive: it is searching the list it made when the drive was last connected. You get the file name, the folder path and the name of the drive it lives on. To open the file you still have to plug that drive in — nothing can conjure the bytes back.
Does it copy or move my files?
No. It reads names and folder structure, and writes them into its own catalogue. It never writes to your drives and it is not a backup tool. If a drive fails, NanoTracker can tell you what was on it — it cannot give it back.
Do my files or file names go to the cloud?
No. The catalogue lives on your computer, or on your own NAS if your studio shares one. Nothing is sent to us or to anyone else.
What happens when a drive comes back with a different letter?
Nothing. A drive is recognised by what is written on the drive itself, not by the letter Windows happens to give it that day. Rename it, move it to another port, plug it into another machine: it stays the same drive in the catalogue.
Can the whole studio see the same catalogue?
Yes, with the Studio licence: the catalogue lives on a NAS or on one of your computers, and everyone sees the same drives. A search then also tells you when a drive is plugged into a colleague's machine right now, and whose.
There is a step-by-step guide for setting that up, written for people who have never touched a NAS.
How long does the first scan take?
It depends on how many folders a drive holds, not on how many terabytes. A drive with tens of thousands of folders takes a couple of minutes, and you watch it happen. After that it only looks at what changed.