Is there a means of tracking files as they are renamed or moved across my hard drives over times?

[Ralf_Reddings]

I asked this question somewhere else, I hope its okay If also ask here as well, if not Mods please remove it. The questions is:

This year I made a massive transition to PowerShell and Cli tools. With massive power comes...

I can easily mass rename or pre append strings to file names and do often. That is fine.

But I write lots of Markdown documents and work on other files that "reference" media files on drives.

So if the file being "referenced" changes, the document will not longer be able to find it and so I end up with broken files.

Lets say I have a markdown file,

Chapter 3.md

that reference

Cats.mp4

and I dont read it for a whole year:

Code: Select all

[img]C:\Users\Ralf\Top Secret thesis\Cats.mp4[/img]

Since then I have renamed

Cats.mp4

file, its parent folder and maybe even moved it to another drive that has a entirely different folder structure.

Reading that

Chapter 3.md

document a year later I would not know where to begin with where this file is.

But lets say that file exitst somewhere entirely entact but only with a different file name and folder.

Is there then a way to identify this file through means other than a file name or parent folder?

I am contantly seeing people reference words like

Hash3

,

Checksum

, are they applicable here?

Can I instead search for such a property that this file holds that will not change?

Maybe there is a propperty windows uses to keep track of files, even as their names and locations change?

I am thinking, If I take note of such a property, then, a year later I can search for that propery instead of the filename to find specific files.

Searching speed across multiple drives is not an issue for me, I have a robust search utility, Search Everything, through it I can pretty much find any known property belonging to a file very quickly, I have a few PowerShell Modules that use Everything as a backend engine too.

[void]

Please consider the Index Journal and index journal logging.

With logging enabled you can search your index-journal-YYYY-MM-DD.txt files for Cats.mp4 and work out where the file went.

[Ralf_Reddings]

This is more than I was hoping to find. An everything solution is ideal. I will look more into this feature. Thanks allot for helping!