I built Questract because I ran into a problem that I suspect a lot of people quietly have. Over the years I ended up with a pile of ageing hard drives, USB sticks and old backup disks going back more than twenty years. Across them were photos, videos, documents, music production project files and a ridiculous amount of MP3s from different Windows machines across some more formidable eras of my life. Everything was scattered across messy folder structures and old windows operating systems which weren't going to be easy to navigate. The bigger issue was that these drives are not immortal. Old disks fail, connectors break and things get lost or damaged. At some point I realised that if I did not deal with it soon I was going to lose important parts of my personal history. What I actually needed was a way to build a new and proper master offline archive. I needed something that could scan everything properly, find the files that mattered and intelligently reorganise them when they were copied to a new SSD That's why I decided to build Questract. It thoroughly scans old drives and messy directory trees, extracts the files worth keeping and rebuilds them into something structured. Photos can be organised by year and/or month, media types separated, and huge music collections can be scanned and reorganised so you can rediscover songs long forgotten. While testing it I started finding photos of family and friends I had not seen in years, and music I had completely forgotten about. That alone made the whole project worth it. I decided to release Questract completely free because the problem it solves is something almost everyone runs into eventually. People accumulate years of digital memories across old drives and devices, and most of the time those memories just sit there at risk of being lost. I didn't want a price to be a barrier for what was such an important tool for me. If Questract helps someone rescue their own digital history before an old drive dies, SD card is lost or USB thumb stick stops working, then the project has done its job. The software doesn't send out any usage stats and all your data remains on your machine as this is a privacy first tool designed for offline use.

Questract

Questract Launches for FREE on the MacOS App Store

Questract Launches for FREE on the MacOS App Store