The media company I worked for had a large library of external hard drives which were used as 
storage for projects in production as well as an archive of older projects. This system was 
economical but problems arose when footage from a past project was requested and we would have to 
search across multiple disconnected drives to find it. Physically unplugging these drives, 
swapping out hard drive sleds and remounting them felt inefficient and tedious, 
so I developed a better way.

I wrote a python script with a very simple GUI that lets the user select a drive to “map”.  
This script then forms a XML document with the drive structure and uploads it via FTP.  
A small php script on the server displays all the XML files uploaded by the script through 
the use of jsTree, a great javascript tree library. Now the entire library is searchable 
and updated so files can be found quickly.