Copernic Desktop Pro

1. Copernic Desktop Search Pro”: I am not sure I can recommend this to anyone, but I think it has endless potential.
2. I have known about this application for nearly 20 years and once I mistakenly thought it was a competitor to Google.
3. It is not. It is a search engine for your own personal computer including, if you can figure it out, your external hard drive.
4. I have had perhaps 15 external hard drives in my life and still have them sitting on a shelf or in a box.
5. But, each time I retired one, I added it as a folder onto my 5 TB external drive, and I then copy those files to a backup 5 TB external drive.
6. I am a little bit paranoid about losing stuff.
7. I just finished indexing 1.5 Million Files! 
8. I don’t know how many of you remember Napster which was a music-sharing platform that eventually got shut down. Think of it as a free Spotify, Pandora, or Apple Music. 
9. At the time it seemed to be a miracle as you could download almost any song from any era in any version.
10. I remember writing to 100 friends on my email list, before Facebook, and soliciting each one’s 10 favorite albums and 10 favorite songs most of which I downloaded.
11. John B Hunter let me copy 6000 of his, and they are all on that one external drive as well as 500,000 photographs including many duplicates, and many of them cropped and “improved“, but with the originals also.
12. Family archives, documents, great grandfathers’ diaries, the whole works are there including cousin Lark’s and others’ family trees.
13. How will one be able to write a true biography of any productive person?
14. If I have 2 million documents just related to my humble life, imagine what famous people have, millions, even the guy who flushes his down the toilet. (that’s a topical comment that will soon have lost its meaning.)
15. Lots of little nooks and crannies and, in some cases, secrets.
16. Yesterday I spent two hours trying to install this $25 program, Copernic Desktop Pro.
17. Finally I wrote to them, and they had to unscramble my multi-layered mess as I had downloaded three separate Installs but simply could not open the zip file to find a license key.
18. Finally I got an email from their “real” contact person and now it has been at it for 16 hours indexing that one file which always must be placed in the same USB port.
19. If you want to store family photos and other things you have to have some way to search for them.
20. Windows search engine is getting better. Outlook’s drives me nots.
21. I think for most people Google Photos is absolutely ideal for photo storage because, with face recognition and object recognition, its search capabilities are powerful and you can have an album about every good friend,  relative, and pet. 
22. Warning, it can’t quite tell the difference between our dog Cinca and the late, dearly missed,  Duffy, and it will sometimes ask me whether my baby picture and a picture of Winston Churchill are the same person!
23. And be careful if you post 100 year old array of photos family photos with a baby with no drawers, Facebook will ban you for a month if you try that one. Don’t ask me how I know that. 
24. If you are a natural at organizing and saving, good for you. I will continue to struggle to find something that will work for me. For now, I am not giving up on Copernic Desktop Pro. 

This post was written by Burton Hunter