Hi HN. I built File Hunter because I have a drawer full of USB drives and no idea what's on them without plugging each one in.

File Hunter is a self-hosted, web-based file manager. You point it at any folder — USB drive, network share, DVD — and it catalogs everything into SQLite. When you unplug the drive, the full catalog stays. You can browse, search, and review files on storage that isn't connected.

The other thing it does well is deduplication. A three-tier hashing strategy (file size → xxHash64 partial → SHA-256 full) finds exact duplicates across all your locations with minimal I/O. Then you can consolidate: keep one copy, stub the rest, full audit trail.

Some numbers: I run it on a catalog of ~7 million files across 9.6 TB and 10 locations. The UI stays responsive during scans.

Tech: Python, Starlette, uvicorn, SQLite (WAL mode), vanilla JavaScript. No frameworks, no build step, no npm. One curl command to install:

    curl -fsSL https://filehunter.zenlogic.uk/install | bash

It's MIT-licensed and free. There's a paid Pro tier that adds remote agents (scan machines across the network into one catalog), but everything on the GitHub page is the free version and will stay that way.

  Website: https://filehunter.zenlogic.uk
  GitHub: https://github.com/zen-logic/file-hunter

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the dedup strategy, or anything else.