MediaVault is a personal catalog for a lifetime of creative work — a private card index for your files across photography, film, music, and writing. It's built for the creator whose work spans formats and decades: the same subject might live at once as photographs, a film, a musical score, and written reflection.

It is not an editor and not a cloud service. It doesn't change your files or replace your editing apps. It organizes your work the way it was actually made — by discipline, theme, project, and the working sub-folders inside each project — so you can answer the question every archive eventually asks: "Where is that, and what was it part of?"

No. MediaVault never moves, copies, or alters your original files when you catalog them — it simply keeps track of where they already live. Even when you drag files in, the originals stay exactly where they are on your drives.

MediaVault is built specifically for the Mac. Its whole approach is designed around the deep file organization and drive access that really only makes sense on a full computer. There's no iPhone or iPad version at this time.

No — and this is the whole point of the thing. Once a drive has been catalogued you no longer need it connected to know what's on it. You can search every file on every drive, see which drive each one lives on, read your own notes about it, and decide whether it's worth going to fetch.

The drives go back in the closet. The knowledge stays on your desk. Files on a disconnected drive stay fully searchable, with everything you wrote down about them — versions, tags, notes, ratings — intact. You simply can't play or open them until the drive is back, which is exactly what you'd expect.

One drive at a time. Plug one in, catalog the folders on it worth keeping, unplug it, put it back on the shelf, take the next one. Don't plan the whole campaign first — every drive you finish is permanent progress, and nothing is undone by stopping for a week or a season.

Two things make it go faster. Don't catalog everything on the drive — point MediaVault at the finished masters, the delivered work, the projects you'd be sick to lose, and leave the render caches and the eleven copies of a bounce from 2014. And name your drives before you start: MediaVault records whatever macOS calls a drive, so an archive full of "Untitled 3" is a good deal less useful than one reading "Music Masters 2019–22."

Because macOS doesn't let any application open your drives simply because it would like to. Permission has to come from you — macOS puts a panel on screen, you choose the drive yourself, and only then can the app look. No application can grant itself access. It's a good arrangement, and it's what stands between your archive and any program that would rather not ask.

In practice it's almost invisible. Permission is granted once per drive — not per file, not per folder, not per session — and it survives quitting, restarting, and unplugging the drive for three weeks. Usually it happens in passing, the first time you import from a drive. When it hasn't, MediaVault says so and offers a Grant Access button that opens a panel with the right drive already showing.

You get a graceful card instead of a hang — and it tells you which of three quite different things is true, because they ask for different responses.

The drive isn't connected — the commonest, and not a problem at all. Your file is fine; plug the drive in and it comes back. The drive is connected but hasn't been granted permission yet — there's a button right there, and one click solves it for that drive permanently. Everything is connected and permitted, and the file still won't open — which means the file itself has been moved, renamed, or deleted outside MediaVault. The card offers to show you the enclosing folder in the Finder so you can see what happened.

Its files will show as unreachable, because the location MediaVault wrote down no longer exists. Renaming the drive back fixes it immediately, and nothing is lost in the meantime — the catalog entries, notes, and tags are all still there waiting.

It's the reason to give your drives their permanent names before you catalog them rather than after.

Yes, the same way, as long as it's mounted and visible in the Finder. A network volume can be slow to answer, and a NAS that has gone to sleep may take a few seconds to wake before its files become reachable.

Cloud storage works too, with one thing worth knowing: services like Dropbox and iCloud Drive often keep files "online only," leaving a placeholder on your Mac instead of the real thing. MediaVault will catalog the placeholder happily, but a preview may need to fetch the file first. Anything you want reliably available is better kept downloaded.

The catalog survives. You'll still have the complete record of what was on that drive — every filename, version, tag, note, and rating — which is precisely what's needed for an insurance claim, a recovery quote, or the melancholy business of working out what's actually gone.

No, and it matters to be clear about it. MediaVault is a catalog — it tells you what you have and where it is. Backing up the files themselves is a separate job for Time Machine, a cloned drive, a cloud service, or all three.

What MediaVault does back up automatically is its own catalog, so the record of your work is safe. But a catalog of files that exist in only one place is a very good record of what you are about to lose.

Everything hangs on one simple, four-level thread: Category ▸ Theme ▸ Project ▸ Sub-folder.

A Category is a discipline — a shelf, like Music or Photography. A Theme is a grouping inside it, the connective tissue between related projects. A Project is a single work. A Sub-folder is the working structure within that project. The left pane always keeps this thread visible, so the answer to "wait, where am I?" is always written in the corner of the room.

Drag files from the Finder onto the workspace, or use the Import button. An import card appears where you set a version, tags, notes, a 1–5 star rating, and a flag.

Three courtesies are built in: files land in whatever sub-folder you're currently standing in, so a run of imports doesn't scatter; importing many files at once lets a single toggle apply your choices to all of them; and if a file carries a Mac Finder comment, it arrives pre-filled in the Notes field — so decades of margin-notes flow into the catalog instead of being stranded.

A Pull List is a collection tray — the way a film editor or librarian gathers sources for a piece. You're planning something that needs four songs, a session file, and a cover photo, all living in different projects on different drives. You don't want to open them yet; you want to gather them and act later.

Right-click any file → Add to Pull List. Files never move — a pull list is pure reference. Each source gets a tick-box to check off as you physically retrieve it, and the whole sheet can be exported to PDF or printed, so you can walk down the list at the machine with the drives mounted, ticking boxes in pencil.

The Tag Builder. Erratic tagging is how tagging systems die — was that file tagged "audio," or "interview," or "audio interview"? Click the gold Tag Builder link and every tag you've ever used appears as tappable chips, most-used first, each with its count. Tapping "interview (23)" beats retyping and misspelling it. Reusing an existing tag is always easier than inventing a near-duplicate — which is the entire trick.

Yes. Nothing in MediaVault is destructive. Press ⌘Z and the last move reverses exactly — back to the precise project and sub-folder it came from.

Undo covers deletes too. Delete a file and ⌘Z restores it whole — rating, flag, notes, color, even its pull-list memberships. Delete a sub-folder and ⌘Z rebuilds the entire branch, every nested folder and file intact. Even deleting a whole custom shelf is one ⌘Z from being undone.

Yes — this is one of MediaVault's most useful ideas. A filename rarely tells you whether it's the take with the violins or the one without. So don't read the file — hear it, without leaving the app.

Flip on the Preview toggle, then rest your cursor on a file's Location. Audio plays with a scrubber you can drag to any point (jump straight to how a piece ends). Video rolls inline. Documents, PDFs, Pages, and images — even Photoshop files — render right there. A live spectrum analyzer glows in beneath audio as it plays, enough of a glance-check to tell an all-bass scratch mix from a finished master before you've listened past the first second.

Yes. The hover card shows a graphic map of where the file physically lives — the volume, each folder, and the file itself — and every level is a doorway. Click any rung and that level opens in the Finder, even if your file sits three levels deep. Wondering what else is in the folder holding this song? Click the folder rung and its Finder window opens.

Yes — that's most of what they're for. A preview needs the drive connected and MediaVault granted permission for it, which is a once-per-drive matter handled in a click (see Your Drives above). After that, playing a take off an archive drive is no different from playing one off your desktop.

If a file can't be reached, MediaVault says so plainly and tells you which of three things is wrong, rather than freezing while it waits.

Yes. Every time MediaVault opens, it checks its own database for damage and then saves a fresh backup on its own — no button, no decision required. The newest 14 backups are kept; older ones age out quietly. If the check ever finds something actually wrong, the app repairs itself by restoring the most recent good backup before anything else loads.

There's also a quiet "Backup Now" button in the workspace header, worth a habit before anything that touches a lot of files — a big import, a reorganizing session, or a demo where someone else has their hands on the keyboard.

Yes — that's Restore from Backup, in the Data & Storage screen under Backups & Data Safety. It's placed somewhere deliberately less convenient, because restoring is destructive: it replaces the entire catalog with an earlier snapshot. It's the fire extinguisher behind the glass — good to know exactly where it is, and otherwise easy to forget about.

Every available backup is listed by date and time. Choosing Restore names the exact moment it will roll back to, warns you plainly that anything since then will be gone, and takes one more safety snapshot of the current state first, in case the wrong one gets picked.

Your library — all your tags, notes, and file organization — lives directly on your own Mac, in a private folder in your user Library, and nowhere else. There is no server operated by the developer, because there isn't one.

MediaVault has no server, no account system, and no way to access your library. It collects no analytics, no tracking, and no usage data of any kind. The full privacy policy is available right in the app, under Data & Storage → Privacy Policy.

No. MediaVault is a one-time purchase through the Mac App Store — no subscription, no recurring charges. You pay once and it's yours, including updates within that version line.