• For technical reasons (see below), aliases take a lot of room, and they take more room on a big hard disk than on a small one.
You can partition your hard disk and create the Cataloged disks folder on a small partition. You can put 1000 aliases on a 1MB partition. You can create a partition with a size lower than 60MB and you will get aliases that occupy 1K. Much more room would be needed on a big hard disk. Tools like Norton Utilities‚Ñ¢ 2.0 allow you to create soft partitions without reformatting your hard disk.
Technical Note : The Macintosh File Manager uses blocks of fixed size on hard disks, and consequently the sizes of the files are multiples of this minimum size which is equal to (size of the disk) / 65536, rounded up.
For example, on a 240 MB hard disk, the smallest files occupy 4K, 8K, 12K , and so on,... If you have only two 100K files on the disk and if they really occupy 97K, you only lose 6K. But if you have 25 8K files and if they each really occupy 5K each, you lose 75K ! The real size of an alias is about 600 bytes (about 0.6K). Are we still together ?
• If you want to force AutoCat™ to catalog a volume that would not be cataloged (because of your selected preferences), you can hold down the [Shift] key while you are unmounting the volume : the preferences will be ignored and the volume will be cataloged.
• You can stop AutoCat™ while it is working (the pointer is an AutoCat™ symbol) by pressing the [Command] and [.] keys. (The usual way to interrupt a process.)
• You can print out the contents of a catalog by: selecting by Name in the View Finder™'s menu, opening all the folders, and then select Print Window... in The File menu ; or Select All and Copy in order to copy the names of your files and folders to the Clipboard for later printing.
• You can put an alias of your Cataloged disks folder in the Apple menu. Utilities which make the Apple menu hierarchic make it easy to navigate through your catalog. Similarly, using tools such as the terrific PopupFolder™ could simplify manual searching for a file.
